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? Can we ask people, with standard survey instruments, what they think a fair amount of tax would be? Most people would tend to ask for lower taxes without considering the trade-offs for themselves and others. This paper examines the preferences of the German electorate using the method of factorial survey. This method allows us to measure attitudes towards distribution and tax policies considering these trade-offs. In our design, respondents were confronted with different scenarios (vignettes) of small, hypothetical societies including five persons. Three persons differ in their income, while the other two do not earn any money yet display different situations of life (e.g. unemployed, searching for a job; longtime unemployed not searching for a job or unemployed mother of two children). The respondents were asked to distribute the total amount of income in each of those different hypothetical societies. The variation of attributes between the different societies enables us to isolate effects of income distribution and life situation on taxation and redistribution. Besides those situational factors, we assume that individual characteristics of the respondents interact with the situational variables, thus influencing distribution preferences. The degree of redistribution might be one of the most important issues concerning political ideology. We assume that individual political values and party preferences trigger individual attitudes to distribution policies. The factorial survey is included in the <<Ethik-Monitor 2006>>, a study focusing on personal values and attitudes towards society, government, and political actors (Method: 1000 computer assisted personal interviews representing the German electorate). The variables concerning values and political attitudes and social context (e.g., socializing agents) will be used as individual context-variables in our analysis.
