WZB Distinguished Lectures in Social Sciences – Social Preferences and Redistributive Politics by Ernst Fehr

Increasing inequality and associated egalitarian sentiments have again put redistribution on the political agenda. Support for redistribution may also be affected by altruistic and egalitarian preferences (“social preferences”), but knowledge about the distribution of these preferences in the broader population and how they relate to political support for redistributive policies is still scarce. In this lecture, we take advantage of Swiss direct democracy, where people voted several times in national plebiscites on strongly redistributive policies, to study the link between social preferences and support for redistribution in a broad sample of the Swiss population.