Does Contextualising Income Inequality Matter? Framing Effects on Support for Income Redistribution

Numerous empirical studies analysing attitudes towards income redistribution rely on cross-national data from the European Social Survey (ESS) or the International Social Survey Program. In these surveys, pro-redistributive attitudes are typically measured using agreement with a single statement, such as the ESS item: “The government should take measures to reduce differences in income levels.” While widely used, this item has been criticised for leaving redistributive instruments unspecified, ignoring fiscal constraints (Rehm, 2009), and primarily capturing a general egalitarian orientation rather than policy-specific support (Dallinger, 2022). Recent work further shows that citizens do not necessarily associate abstract support for reducing inequality with concrete redistributive policies such as progressive taxation or social transfers (Margalit & Raviv, 2024). This study contributes to debates on inequality framing by examining whether and how contextualising income inequality affects responses to the ESS questionnaire item. A large body of research demonstrates that citizens hold systematically biased perceptions of income inequality and rely on heuristics when forming their evaluations of inequality (Choi, 2019; Engelhardt & Wagener, 2014; Gimpelson & Treisman, 2015). From a framing perspective, this raises the question of whether different representations of inequality, commonly employed by political actors, experts and the media, shape pro-redistributive attitudes by activating distinct cognitive reference points, such as the relative position of the individual or aggregate distributional outcomes. To address this question, the study draws on a survey experiment conducted on a sample of nearly 1,700 respondents representative of the adult population in the Czech Republic. Respondents were randomly assigned to one of four treatment conditions or a control group. Two treatments framed inequality in terms of concrete annual income thresholds for contrasting income groups (P10 vs. P90 and P20 vs. P80), while two additional treatments framed inequality in terms of the shares of national income earned by these groups (S10 vs. S90 and S20 vs. S80). The control group answered the standard ESS item without any additional contextual information. The results show that pro-redistributive attitudes are largely robust to the provision of inequality information, particularly when inequality is framed in aggregate terms. Providing information on income shares does not significantly affect average support for income redistribution compared to the control condition. By contrast, framing inequality through income thresholds leads to significantly lower aggregate support for income redistribution, although the effect sizes are modest (Cohen’s d = 0.19 and 0.28). Importantly, threshold-based frames strengthen the negative association between respondents’ income position and support for redistribution, suggesting that such frames heighten the salience of individuals’ relative economic standing and activate self-interested reasoning. These findings address research on communicative strategies related to economic inequality. They suggest that not all inequality frames are politically equivalent: while abstract or aggregate frames leave pro-redistributive attitudes largely unchanged, frames emphasising concrete income distances can subtly polarise attitudes along income lines. The study thus highlights how the framing of inequality information, rather than the actual level of inequality per se, can shape public support for income redistribution, even in relatively low-inequality contexts, such as the Czech Republic.