Just Redistribution - How Social Cognitions Interact with Situational Triggers and Personal Assets in the Process of Forming Distribution Preferences

Distribution policies matter. Politics is not at least a contest of different ideas or preferences about taxation and redistribution of income. But what do people think about tax or distribution policies? Standard measures of attitudes towards redistribution do not capture the complex situation in the process of preference formation. This paper examines redistribution preferences of the German electorate using a modified version of conjoint design (Method: 1003 computer assisted personal interviews representing the German electorate). In this design the respondents were asked to distribute the total amount of income in different hypothetical societies. This allows us to measure preferences about the distribution of income on a finer grained (e.g. as Gini-Coefficient of the hypothetical society) level as standard survey questions usually do. The variation of situational triggers between the different societies enables us to isolate effects of the initial income distributions and their interaction with social cognitions like trust in government, justice beliefs about the tax-system, and personal assets of the respondent. Our results show that situational triggers as well as social cognitions play a crucial role in forming distribution preferences. The paper contributes to the literature on attitudes towards taxation and redistribution, the methodological literature on survey experiments and it complements the theoretical literature on justice principles in political philosophy.