Deliberating Inequality: A Blueprint for Studying the Social Formation of Beliefs about Economic Inequality
Social Justice Research (with Kate Summers, Fabien Accominotti, Tania Burchardt, Katharina Hecht, and Liz Mann)
In most contemporary societies people underestimate the extent of economic inequality, resulting in lower support for taxation and redistribution than would be expressed by better informed citizens. We still know little, however, about where perceptions and misperceptions of inequality come from. This article takes an important step toward filling this gap by developing a research design to study how people’s beliefs about income and wealth inequality emerge from social interaction. Our approach combines insights from recent scholarship highlighting the socially situated character of inequality beliefs with those of survey experimental work testing how information about inequality changes people’s understandings of it. Specifically, we propose to use deliberative focus groups to replicate the interactional contexts in which individuals process information and form beliefs in real social life. Leveraging an experimental methodology, our design then varies the social makeup of deliberative groups, as well as the information about inequality we share with participants to explore how different types of social environments and information shape people’s perceptions of economic inequality. This lets us test, in particular, whether the low socioeconomic diversity of people’s discussion and interaction networks is to blame for their tendency to underestimate inequality, and whether beliefs about opportunity explain people’s lack of appetite for redistributive policies. In this exploratory article we motivate our methodological apparatus and describe its key features, before reflecting on the findings from a proof-of-concept study conducted in London in the fall of 2019.
click for PDF | doi: 10.1007/s11211-022-00389-0 (open access)
Photograph by Kate Summers