Social Preferences and Redistributive Politics
Introduction by Mira Fischer
Moderated by Steffen Huck
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.
Ernst Fehr has been Professor of Microeconomics and Experimental Economics at the University of Zurich since 1994. He served as director of the Institute for Empirical Research in Economics and chairman of the Department of Economics at the University of Zurich. He currently serves as director of the UBS International Center of Economics in Society.
Mira Fischer is Research Fellow at the WZB Research Unit Market Behavior.
Steffen Huck is Director of the WZB Research Unit Economics of Change.
The lecture is part of the WZB Distinguished Lectures in Social Sciences.
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