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How does wealth affect preferences for redistribution? In general, social scientists have largely neglected to study the social effects of wealth. This neglect was partially due to a dearth of data on household wealth and social outcomes, and also to greater scholarly interest in how wealth has been accumulated rather than the social effects of wealth. While we would expect household wealth to be an important component of attitudes toward inequality and social welfare policies, research in this area is scarce. In this study, the relationship between wealth and preferences for redistribution is examined in cross-national global and comparative perspective using data on 31 countries from the 2009 wave of the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP), the first wave of that study to include measures of wealth. The findings presented compare the effects of two types of wealth—financial assets and home equity—and demonstrate that there are differences in effects by asset type and by redistributive policy in question. Financial wealth is more closely associated with attitudes about income equality, while home equity is more closely associated with attitudes about unemployment benefits. Moreover, while the upper categories of financial wealth have the largest negative effects on support for income equality, it is the middle categories of home equity that are most strongly associated with opposition to unemployment benefits. Effects also differ by country, but not in patterns that theories of comparative welfare states nor political economy would adequately explain.

ObjectiveThis article explores how income inequality and social mobility affect attitudes about redistribution in global perspective.MethodsIndividual‐level data on over 50,000 individuals from 38 countries in the International Social Survey Programme are combined with country‐level data from the World Bank, Standardized Income Inequality Database, and the Economic Freedom of the World data. OLS regression models with robust, clustered standard errors are estimated to account for the presence of unobserved, country‐level effects in the error terms.ResultsSocial mobility is found to be a more important predictor of preferences for redistribution than income inequality. Specifically, those who live in countries with greater social mobility are more supportive of redistribution while individuals who have experienced upward mobility themselves are less supportive, although an upwardly mobile individual in a more mobile society is more supportive of redistribution than an upwardly mobile individual in a less mobile society.ConclusionsThe central finding of this study is that the tangibility of redistributive social policies may bolster support for social spending. The structures and institutions that facilitate upward mobility—and potentially attenuate some of the detrimental effects of income inequality—are generally the products of more comprehensive redistribution policies, and public opinion may reflect this.

While there is a large literature on attitudes toward immigrants, scholars have not systematically examined the determinants of attitudes toward refugees. Often, refugees are simply treated as a subset of immigrants, under the assumption that attitudes toward both sets of foreigners are similar. In this article, we examine whether there are distinctions between attitudes toward refugees and immigrants, as well as variation in their determinants. We address these questions using individual-level data from 16 countries in the 2002 and 2014 waves of the European Social Survey. We demonstrate that these two groups of foreigners are, indeed, viewed as distinct and that differences emerge because attitudes toward refugees are more often related to macro-level factors while immigrants are more frequently associated with micro-level economic concerns. By distinguishing between refugees and immigrants, this article addresses an important gap in the academic literature on attitudes toward foreigners in Europe.

We provide an overview of the field of preferences for redistribution research, including divergent terminological and theoretical approaches. We review the different uses of public attitudes, policy preferences and public opinion. We outline the theoretical roles of material interests, values and opinion-policy endogeneity. We also introduce and summarize the original research presented in this Special Issue. Among the key contributions of the Special Issue to the subfield are novel explorations of how socialization affects preferences for redistribution; an examination of how perceptions about inequality translate into policy preferences; a call for more research into the links between taxation and social policy preferences; explanations for the paradox of low levels of support for redistribution in the famously-generous Nordic countries; and new insights into class-specific policy preferences as well as the roles of immigration and diversity in determining such preferences.

A substantial literature exists within sociology and political science positing a negative link between racial/ethnic heterogeneity and a host of social goods issues. Recent large-scale meta-analyses, however, have established that the effect of racial/ethnic heterogeneity on social policy attitudes may be more salient at the local or even neighborhood level. In extending this work, we examined how racial/ethnic heterogeneity affects attitudes about redistribution within one of the most diverse and ethnically heterogeneous cities in the world, New York City. Specifically, we assessed the effects of perceived neighborhood racial/ethnic heterogeneity on preferences for redistribution and social policies among members of majority and minority groups. A diverse sample of New York City residents recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk (mTurk) responded to a series of questions regarding their perceptions of the diversity of their neighborhood before indicating their social policy preferences. We found that neighborhood racial/ethnic heterogeneity was associated with greater support for redistribution and social policies. The only evidence of a negative association with support for redistribution or social policies was for black and white respondents living in majority white neighborhoods. Together, these data suggest that perceptions of racial/ethnic heterogeneity on redistributive and social policy attitudes may be a function of one's group status. Implications for the existing research are discussed. In particular, we believe this work offers new insights into the relationship between racial/ethnic heterogeneity and social policy preferences.

This paper examines the consequences of China's dramatic socioeconomic and political transformations for individual subjective well-being (SWB) from 1990 to 2007. Although many still consider China to be a collectivist country, and some scholars have argued that collectivist factors would be important predictors of individual well-being in such a context, our analysis demonstrates that the Chinese are increasingly prioritizing individualist factors in assessments of their own happiness and life satisfaction thus substantiating descriptions of their society as increasingly individualistic. While the vast majority of quality of life studies have focused on Westerners, this study contributes findings from the unique cultural context of China. Moreover, concentration on this particular period in Chinese history offers insight into the relationship between SWB and rapid socioeconomic and political change.

In this article, we analyze anti- and pro-immigrant attitudes expressed following the Essex Lorry Deaths tragedy in October 2019 in Britain, in which 39 Vietnamese immigrants died in a sealed lorry truck on their way to their destination. We apply Structural Topic Modeling, an automated text analysis method, to a Twitter dataset (N= 4,376), to understand public responses to the Lorry Deaths incident. We find that Twitter users' posts were organized into two themes regarding attitudes toward immigrants: (1) migration narratives, stereotypes, and victim identities, and (2) border control. Within each theme, both pro- and anti-immigration attitudes were expressed. Pro-immigration posts reflected counter-narratives that challenged the mainstream media's coverage of the incident and critiqued the militarization of borders and the criminalization of immigration. Anti-immigration posts ranged from reproducing stereotypes about Vietnamese immigrants to explicitly blaming the victims themselves or their families for the deaths. This study demonstrates the uses and limitations of using Twitter for public opinion research by offering a nuanced analysis of how pro-and anti-immigration attitudes are discussed in response to a tragic event. Our research also contributes to a growing literature on public opinion about an often-forgotten immigrant group in the UK, the Vietnamese.

Researchers have investigated the effects of ethnic heterogeneity on a range of socioeconomic and political outcomes. However, approaches to measuring ethnic diversity vary not only across fields of study but even within subfields. In this review, we systematically dissect the computational approaches of prominent measures of diversity, including polarization, and discuss where and how differences emerge in their relationships with outcomes of interest to sociologists (social capital and trust, economic growth and redistribution, conflict, and crime). There are substantial similarities across computations, which are often generalizations or specializations of one another. Differences in how racial and ethnic groupings are constructed and in level of geographic analysis explain many divergences in empirical findings. We conclude by summarizing the type of measurement technique preferred by outcome, when relevant, and provide considerations for future researchers contemplating how best to operationalize diversity. Finally, we highlight two less widely used yet promising measures of diversity.