Thesis title: Preferences for Redistribution and Voting Intention: An Empirical Inquiry
This thesis includes the three most representative research articles that I have produced during my Ph.D. in Economics at Sapienza University of Rome. In my research, I tried to combine microeconometrics methods with some insights
from behavioral economics to understand different drivers of people’s social and voting preferences. In the first chapter of my thesis, I use German data to show that good-looking
people are less willing to support income redistribution, are more inclined to develop meritocratic beliefs, and are more likely to vote for liberal parties. A plausible driver of these results is the self-serving bias. The literature has shown that beautiful people are more successful than their peers, thanks to their beauty. It may be that good-looking people attribute most of their success to merit rather than beauty. The contribution of this work is to shed light on the mostly unexplored relationship between experienced luck, beliefs about luck and merit, and egalitarianism. The second chapter is joint work with Tommaso Reggiani (Cardiff University).
We suggest that workers support redistribution also to cope with the instability of their reference income. The main idea of our paper is that tolerance of inequality depends on loss aversion. We present evidence of this behavior by exploiting the introduction of the National MinimumWage (NMW) in the UK, which institutionally set a baseline pay reducing the risk of income losses for British workers at the bottom of the income distribution. Based on data from the British Household Panel Survey, we show that workers who benefit from the NMW scheme became significantly more tolerant of inequality and more likely to vote for the Conservative party. In the third chapter, I take advantage of the strong sentiment of dissatisfaction
experienced by young people in 1968 in Europe to show that a permanent reduction in political satisfaction affects voting for populism. I use data from the European Social Survey. My empirical strategy builds on a theory that comes from the social psychology literature showing that people form their political opinion when they are between 18 and 25 years old. I show that those who were in this age range in 1968 are more dissatisfied with current governments and are more likely to vote for populism. During my Ph.D. I also produced other research papers, benefiting from several co-authorships. I worked on a paper on pro-environmental behaviors with Luisa Corrado and Alessandra Pelloni (Tor Vergata University), I worked on a paper on the political costs of lockdown enforcement with Fabio Sabatini (Sapienza University of Rome) and Tommaso Reggiani (Cardiff University). I also joined additional projects on populism and preferences for redistribution that are still ongoing. Although some of these works are already complete, I decided not to include them in my thesis so to guarantee better coherence and to present to the committee the works that mostly represent my research.