Support for Income Redistribution in Europe: Assessing the Role of Unemployment at Different Levels

This paper aims to present detailed analyses of the impact of unemployment on attitudes towards income redistribution in more than twenty European countries. At the individual level, the analysis assesses whether being currently unemployed or having experienced a longer spell of unemployment (longer than three months) has a stronger effect on support for income redistribution. In line with material self-interest theories, previous research confirmed that unemployment status is indeed associated with higher support for redistribution. Nevertheless, previous research on the effect of past personal experience with unemployment is less common, while studies on their simultaneous effects are scarce. At higher levels, this paper studies longitudinal and cross-sectional relationships between two types of unemployment rates and support for redistribution. In particular, the paper aims to assess whether it is the actual unemployment rates or long-term unemployment rates that influence pro-redistributive attitudes. Three-level hierarchical models (proposed by Fairbrother 2014) estimated on the first eight rounds of European Social Survey suggest that past personal experience with longer unemployment spell has a much stronger effect on pro-redistributive attitudes than being currently unemployed. Furthermore, the two individual-level unemployment variables are not interacted (i.e. only their main effects are statistically significant). Model results thus suggest that past personal experience with unemployment has a strong, lasting impact on Europeans´ support for redistribution. These key results hold while controlling for numerous other individual-level predictors. At higher levels, all contextual variables were decomposed into between (cross-sectional) and within (longitudinal) components. Results suggest that country-level unemployment rates are positively associated with overall support for redistribution (i.e. positive cross-sectional relationship). Within-country deviations from average unemployment rate have a negligible impact (i.e. there is no overall longitudinal relationship). Long-term unemployment rate (measured as a proportion of long-term unemployed among all unemployed), on the other hand, has no significant effect on the country and country-round support for income redistribution. Public social spending as a proxy measure of the overall redistribution in a country is not significantly associated with pro-redistributive attitudes (when controlling for other contextual variables). Finally, hierarchical models display positive within-country effect of income inequality which is in agreement with previous research (Schmidt-Catran 2016). Varying reactions of European publics to changing economic conditions explain the absence of the overall longitudinal relationship between unemployment rates and support for income redistribution. While the Great Recession and the European sovereign debt crisis were in general associated with increased support for redistribution (and also higher unemployment rates), taking a longer-term perspective implemented in this article (2002-2017) suggests positive longitudinal association in some European countries, no generalisable pattern in most studied countries and even negative relationship in a few European countries. Significant positive cross-sectional relationship, on the other hand, signifies that European countries with higher levels of structural unemployment have higher long term support for income redistribution than countries with relatively low levels of structural unemployment.