Unequal Children Disgruntled Adults? The effect of exposure to inequalities during childhood on social and politicsl trust

It is a long-standing claim within political science that economic inequality leads to dissatisfaction with democracy and distrust in politics. In short, the argument is that high economic inequality is a strong signal that the democratic system does not deliver on a central and often desired parameter: an equal and fair distribution of resources. The general finding in cross-national studies is a negative relationship between economic inequality and citizens’ support for the political system. However, these findings are vulnerable to bias from confounding, and more recent studies using designs less vulnerable to confounding suggest that inequality has a very limited impact on support for the political system. Nevertheless, in this paper, we suggest that it is too early to dismiss the impact of inequalities on support for the political system. We argue that exposure to inequalities during one’s childhood and formative years has the potential to leave lasting marks on one’s support for the political system and be an important explanatory mechanism of the relation between inequalities and support for the political system. As research has shown, environmental cues can be particularly important earlier in life, shaping opinions that remain more stable later in life. We test this argument in Denmark, using a rich dataset combining administrative and survey data. We link geo-referenced public opinion surveys to granular population registry data that enables us to create a range of neighborhood-level measures of inequality during respondents’ childhood and formative years. We generate inequality measures for neighborhoods of a radius ranging from 100 to 2500 meters around respondents’ childhood residences and for the schools in the concomitant year. The survey data provides us with information on individual support for the political system in adulthood, allowing us to test whether early life experiences with inequalities have a lasting impact on individual support for the political system. We then compare evidence from neighborhoods with results from exposure to inequality in schools. We look at a wide range of indicators of income inequalities and exposure to different income groups. Preliminary findings suggest that exposure to bottom and top income groups more than the overall distribution of income can leave lasting marks on people’s trust in the political system, mostly in the school context, suggesting that quality contact has a stronger impact on people's opinions.