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Does Trust in Government Increase Support for Redistribution? Evidence from Randomized Survey Experiments

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 March 2020

KYLE PEYTON Open the ORCID record for KYLE PEYTON [Opens in a new window]
KYLE PEYTON*
Affiliation:
Yale Law School
*
*Kyle Peyton, Postdoctoral Fellow in Law and Social Science, The Justice Collaboratory, Yale Law School, kyle.peyton@yale.edu.
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Abstract

Why have decades of high and rising inequality in the United States not increased public support for redistribution? An established theory in political science holds that Americans’ distrust of government decreases their support for redistribution, but empirical support draws primarily on regression analyses of national surveys. I discuss the untestable assumptions required for identification with regression modeling and propose an alternative design that uses randomized experiments about political corruption to identify the effect of trust in government on support for redistribution under weaker assumptions. I apply this to three survey experiments and estimate the effects that large, experimentally induced increases in political trust have on support for redistribution. Contrary to theoretical predictions, estimated effects are substantively negligible, statistically indistinguishable from zero, and comparable to estimates from two placebo experiments. I discuss implications for theory building about causes of support for redistribution in an era of rising inequality and eroding confidence in government.

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Letter
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American Political Science Review , Volume 114 , Issue 2 , May 2020 , pp. 596 - 602
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 2020 

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Footnotes

Thanks to Peter Aronow, Vivek Ashok, Alex Coppock, Matthew Graham, Jacob Hacker, Gregory Huber, Hakeem Jefferson, Adam Levine, Ro’ee Levy, Matthew Masten, Guatam Nair, Molly Offer-Westort, Fredrik Sävje, Michael Sierra-Arévalo, Francesco Trebbi, Ian Turner, and Jennifer Wu for helpful comments and suggestions. Thanks also to Benjamin Lauderdale and three anonymous reviewers for constructive feedback during the review process. Previous versions of the manuscript were presented and benefited from feedback in the Department of Political Science and the Institution for Social and Policy Studies (ISPS) at Yale University while I was a PhD candidate and ISPS Policy Fellow. Data were collected as part of cooperative studies on corruption and political trust initiated while I was a Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne with Nicholas Faulkner, Aaron Martin, and Raymond Orr. Research support was provided by ISPS and the University of Melbourne. Experiments 1, 2, and 4 were approved by the University of Melbourne Human Ethics Committee; Experiments 3 and 5 were approved by the Yale University Institutional Review Board. Replication files are available at the American Political Science Review Dataverse: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/L3NT6P.

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