Any experience of childhood poverty affects life chances, but longer exposure is particularly detrimental to education, health, and future earnings. This study examines trends in long-term childhood poverty in Britain. Using a life-course perspective, we tracked poverty from birth to age ten among 1991–2017 birth cohorts. Our findings show that, on average, 17 per cent of children spent at least half of their childhood in poverty. Long-term poverty affected 25 per cent of those born in the early 1990s, markedly declined to 13–14 percent for cohorts born after the post-1997 welfare reforms, and rose again to 23 per cent for children born following the 2013 austerity reforms. These trends are driven by shifts in the penalties associated with work-family risk factors, rather than by changes in their prevalence. These shifts in penalties reflect broader changes in redistribution and predistribution. The decline in the 1990s was largely due to rising employment and earnings in low-income households, whereas the post-austerity surge stems from reduced redistribution. For cohorts born in the 2000s, social transfers played a substantial role in containing long-term poverty despite worsening predistribution. Overall, the findings show that long-term childhood poverty is a major challenge in Britain and highlight the need to strengthen redistribution and predistribution.

Since the euro crisis, national stereotypes have often been present in the political and media discourse on European Union (EU) economic governance. Yet, despite the frequency of such stereotypes in political rhetoric and media coverage, little is known about their prevalence in public opinion or in connection with citizen preferences on EU redistribution. This article examines the relationship between national stereotypes held by EU citizens and their policy preferences for EU redistribution. We conduct an observational survey in four countries capturing regional differences in the EU: Germany (Western Europe), Italy (Southern Europe), Romania (Eastern Europe), and Sweden (Northern Europe). Our findings show that, on average, individuals who attribute more positive economic stereotypes (e.g., trustworthy, hardworking, efficient) to other EU nationalities tend to be more supportive of general solidarity in the EU, reducing inequality between member states, and the establishment of an EU-wide welfare state. Conversely, those who attribute more negative economic stereotypes (e.g., corrupt, greedy, lazy) to other EU nationalities are less likely to support such redistributive measures. We also find substantial heterogeneity between country samples, which may reflect differences in economic standing within the EU and historical experiences with stereotypes. Taken together, the findings reveal that national stereotypes are not only widespread in public opinion but also systematically linked to preferences for redistribution. The study contributes to the public opinion literature on transnational solidarity by showing how enduring national stereotypes can precede and inform narratives of deservingness.

Why would a strong authoritarian state choose not to enforce its own policy? We extend the theory of forbearance to autocracies, highlighting its distinct incentives and characteristics. Using China’s social insurance policies as a case study, we argue that promotion-driven local officials under intense interjurisdictional competition allow firms to evade payroll taxes to boost economic performance and advance their careers. This effect is most significant among domestic private firms and foreign firms. We conduct one of the first systematic analyses of firm-level social insurance contributions in an authoritarian context, supplemented by individual-level survey data. Our findings show that bureaucratic forbearance of China’s social insurance policies has a pro-business bias, undermining the policies originally designed to address inequalities during market reforms.

The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, has described the UK economy as being in its worst state since 1945. Unlike the Labour Government of 1945, Reeves has rejected Beveridge-style public investment, in part because of claims of public support for fiscal restraint. We report findings of innovative, iterative mixed-methods survey (1) n = 693; 2) n = 10; 3) n = 2200) analysis of a programme for progressive tax reform designed to achieve comparable post-war outcomes conducted between November 2023 and January 2024 of adult UK residents. We analyse the findings of survey 3 to assess public support for the policy, impact of narratives and associations with demographic, socio-economic and health data. We find high levels of support for tax and spend, particularly where burdens are placed on wealth and business; significant impact of four narratives to persuade initial opponents to support the policy thematically organised around absolute gains, relative gains, security and environmental benefit; and clear associations between risk of destitution and various other socio-economic characteristics, health status and levels of support. We present structural equation modelling (SEM) of these associations and find moderately strong positive correlations with levels of support for key infrastructural policies. This suggests high levels of support for progressive taxation.

Having long shied away from proactively politicizing issues of European integration, the past crisis decade has put generally pro‐European mainstream parties under pressure to spell out more clearly which kind of Europe they support. We distinguish two such fundamental ideas of Europe: the redistributive polity, organizing transnational solidarity and the regulatory polity, strengthening national self‐reliance. Both notions are integrationist, but they come with distinct policy implications. What determines mainstream party support for either of these polity ideas? We investigate this question on data provided by the ‘EUandI’ voting advice application, which contains party positions on core issues of integration for all EU member states for the four European Parliament elections between 2009 and 2024. Mainstream party support for redistribution, we find, is generally driven by their ideological placement on the economic and cultural dimension. While progressive and left parties tend towards EU‐level redistribution, conservative and right parties are wedded to the idea of a regulatory European polity. This general dynamic, however, interacts with parties’ domestic considerations, that is, the public salience of an issue and a country's net‐payer status in the EU. We further find that the effect of mainstream parties’ ideological positioning differs across policy domains. While cultural and economic positions drive support for redistribution in fiscal and taxation policy to a nearly equal extent, support for redistribution in migration policy is driven by cultural factors alone, while in matters of security and defence right mainstream parties are more supportive of European solidarity than parties of the mainstream left. Our analysis demonstrates that mainstream parties now compete visibly over EU‐level redistribution, but that their stances on transnational solidarity differ depending on the domestic situation and the policy domain in question.

How do people perceive the utility of redistribution? Support for redistribution is commonly understood as being determined by self‐interest in a way that is monotonically proportional to expected net transfers. However, this would imply that average support for redistribution is static and unaffected by changes in the distribution of incomes. This study addresses this incongruence by integrating concepts from the literature on redistribution preferences, namely the diminishing marginal utility of income, inequity aversion and loss aversion. These concepts are formalized by making two distinctions regarding redistribution: absolute versus relative utility and gains versus losses. An analysis of the European/World Values Survey suggests that the preferences of the poor are determined by absolute gains, while the preferences of the rich are determined by relative losses. In other words, the poor care about how much they gain from redistribution, while the rich care about the share of their income that they lose from it. The findings have important implications for the relationships among public opinion, economic development and income inequality.

Seminal models in political economy imply that rising economic inequality should lead to growing public demand for redistribution. Yet, existing empirical evidence on this link is both limited and inconclusive – and scholars regularly doubt it exists at all. In this research note, we turn to data from the International Social Survey Programme's (ISSP) Social Inequality surveys, now spanning the period from 1987 to 2019, to reassess the effect of rising inequality on support for redistribution. Covering a longer time series than previous studies, we obtain robust evidence that when income inequality rises in a country, public support for income redistribution tends to go up. Examining the reaction across income groups to adjudicate between different models of how rising inequality matters in a second step, we find that rising inequality increases support for redistribution within all income groups, with a marginally stronger effect among the well‐off. Our results imply that insufficient policy responses to rising inequality may be less about absent demand and more about a failure to turn demand into policy, and that scholars should devote more attention to the latter.

Increasing attention is placed to redistributive attitudes, especially in the light of growing inequalities throughout the world. From Aristotle to Marx, the discipline classically shares a simple, albeit powerful assumption: individuals are mainly (or even only) motivated by their own self-interest. However, it is also assumed that alternative motivations may emerge as soon as the context allows this to happen. This article tests the impact of economic well-being at the societal level. Two main hypotheses are tested. First, the so-called ‘governmental protection hypothesis’, according to which support for redistribution declines at times of higher levels of national affluence. Second, the ‘declining self-interest hypothesis’, whereby national prosperity is expected to mitigate the income-based polarisation of redistributive preferences. While empirical evidence confirms the former, but not the latter, it also opens up a window of opportunity to develop an alternative theoretical explanation of attitude formation rooted in the social psychological literature.

This article offers a new theoretical explanation of the relationship between religion and the demand for redistribution. Previous literature shows that religious individuals are less likely to favour redistribution either because (a) religion provides a substitute for state welfare provision, or (b) it adds a salient moral dimension to an individual's calculus which induces them to act contrary to their economic interests. In this article, it is argued that the effect of religion on an individual's redistributive preferences is best explained by their partisanship, via a process of partisan motivated reasoning. In contexts where parties are able to combine religion with pro‐redistribution policies, religious individuals are more likely to favour redistribution as doing so reinforces their partisan identity. In advanced democracies, religious individuals are more likely to be supporters of centre‐right parties that oppose redistribution. However, in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) the historical and political context leads to the opposite expectation. The nature of party competition in CEE has seen nationalist populist parties adopt policy platforms that combine religion and leftist economic programmes. They are able to credibly combine these two positions due to the way in which religion and the welfare state became linked to conceptions of the nation during the inter‐war state‐building years. Using data from 2002–2014, the study shows that religiosity is associated with pro‐redistribution attitudes in CEE. Furthermore, religious supporters of nationalist populist parties are more likely to favour redistribution than religious supporters of other parties. The results of this research add greater nuance to our understanding of the relationship between religiosity and economic preferences.

This study provides a novel contribution to the democracy–inequality literature by presenting the belief in democratic redistribution (the view that redistribution is an essential characteristic of democracy) as a conditioning factor. Democracy is expected to reduce inequality when people perceive redistribution as an essential characteristic of it, yet initial analysis shows contrasting results depending on the operationalisation of the indicator. Subsequent findings show, perhaps surprisingly, that democracy is only correlated with lower inequality when more people regard elections and liberties, instead of redistribution, as the essential characteristics of democracy. Democracy is associated with higher inequality when a larger share of the population considers redistribution to be essential to it. It is suggested that in response to the utilitarian view of democracy, authoritarian leaders can gain legitimacy by reducing inequality, whereas elected leaders in a democracy can hold power with little action on redistribution.

This article addresses the virtues of gold open access (OA) from the perspective of its impact on social science scholarly associations and their members. OA has clear and obvious virtues, including redistribution downward and outward of research findings. But it also has the potential for upward redistribution or narrowing of the realm of publication, which this author finds troubling. A central question is who will cover article processing charges. The article identifies five potential sources of the necessary funds or ways to reduce the funds that are necessary, and discusses problems with each in terms of likely gainers and losers. It also identifies two potential substantive concerns about the kinds of social science scholarship most amenable to OA. It concludes by observing that, as is often the case, an apparently narrow technological innovation opens large issues – organizationally, substantively, and even morally.

Explanations of different patterns of preferences for redistribution either highlight the role of the institutional framework in a country or highlight the importance of self‐interest and rational expectations. The study introduces a unified approach to explain differences in preferences for redistributive measures for the case of intergenerational monetary transfers for families and children. Both explanatory approaches are integrated into the action‐based Model of Frame Selection that incorporates normative motives and economic self‐interest into the process of decision making. Using a large sample that deals with questions on the approval of public policies for families and accounts for the normative importance of children and family life in Germany, evidence is provided that both approaches are valid in explaining preferences for government transfers.

Political and economic elites often warn that taxes on the rich impair economic growth. Although such warnings have a long tradition in elite discourse, what the public believes about the effects of progressive taxation remains surprisingly understudied. This omission limits our understanding of a basic democratic mechanism, the congruence of elite and public opinion. To close this gap, we employ a conjoint experiment during the 2021 German national election on a representative quota sample. Participants compare policy packages that entail changes in income, inheritance, and corporate taxes and evaluate their impact on equality and growth. We find no evidence that the public believes that progressive taxes promote equality at the expense of growth. Instead, participants believe that progressive taxes are doubly beneficial, promoting both outcomes. Furthermore, such beliefs do not vary by ideology or economic status. Our findings suggest a more consensual view of progressive taxation that emphasizes positive synergies between economic growth and greater equality.

While the idea of predistribution is gaining traction, it may seem inherently elusive. The source of confusion is the prefix ‘pre’, which denotes priority or prevention. This paper proposes a new functional definition of predistribution that is practically useful and unifies different predistributive policies. Through defending predistribution as policies of ex ante distribution, I offer a philosophically robust notion of priority (‘procedural priority’) and different functions of prevention that help make sense of predistribution. I also develop typologies of different predistributive policies and explore justificatory grounds and strengths of predistribution. I emphasize instrumental reasons for supporting predistribution.