Who Wants What? provides a comprehensive, one-stop shop on the determinants of redistributive preferences and their impact on vote choice in Western Europe and the United States. Using a Meltzer-Richard theoretical model, the first three parts of the book cover factors that influence individuals’ preferences for redistribution. Although income has long preoccupied comparative political scientists who study preferences toward rectifying inequality through the state, David Rueda and Daniel Stegmueller make a convincing case to take expected (future) income seriously—indeed, the authors find that expected future income has a far greater negative effect on preferences toward redistribution than current income. In the second part of the book, they examine how individuals’ material circumstances interact with economic inequality in determining their preferences toward redistribution. Although anecdotal evidence from the 2016 US presidential election and the Brexit referendum suggest that the poor and working class may have been pivotal constituencies in the shift away from (mainstream) left governments, Rueda and Stegmueller find that the poor’s attitudes toward redistribution are fairly constant across different (in)equality contexts. Instead, inequality’s neutralizing impact on income’s negative effect on redistributive preferences matters most for the rich: the rich in highly (economically) unequal societies are more supportive of redistribution because of their fear of inequality’s (positive) impact on crime than are the rich in more equal societies. Similar results are found in Part III of the book, where the authors examine how individuals’ material circumstances interacts with population (racial/ethnic) heterogeneity: although the poor’s support for redistribution does not appear to be dependent on the racial/immigration mix of the society in which they live, rising racial/ethnic heterogeneity does dampen support for redistribution among the rich.
In the fourth part of the book, the authors estimate the direct and indirect effect (via redistributive preferences) of expected income on voters’ preferences for pro-redistributive parties. In the United States, the authors find that expected income has a nonsignificant effect on voting for the Democratic Party. This is because expected income’s direct effect on the probability of voting Democrat is positive, but its indirect effect on voting is negative, because rising expected income reduces demand for redistribution, which Democrats champion more forcefully than Republicans. Moreover, the macro-context affects income’s effect on vote choice for the Democratic Party: in highly (income) unequal and racially homogeneous states, income’s negative impact on voting Democrat is reduced relative to its (negative) impact in more economically equal and racially heterogeneous states. In contrast, in Western Europe, income’s significantly negative impact on voting for parties on the Left is driven largely by its indirect effect (rising expected income reduces one’s demand for redistribution and hence one’s preferences for parties that promote it), whereas expected income’s interaction with economic inequality and racial heterogeneity works similarly in Western Europe as it does in the United States.
There is a lot to like about this book. First, it is a methodological juggernaut. It is a textbook example of how to rigorously and robustly quantitatively test a theoretical argument. The authors use not one but four comprehensive datasets—various waves of the US General Social Survey and European Social Survey, as well as two panel datasets (the British Household Survey and the German Socio-Economic Panel Survey)—to test their arguments, which allows them to maximize cross-country variation in material self-interest and redistributive preferences, as well as examine these dynamics over time for a large sample of individuals. Second, despite the fact that the book uses very sophisticated and complex methods to estimate expected income and empirically test its impact on preferences, it presents these approaches in clear and straightforward ways that are very accessible. Third, the authors situate their findings nicely within recent comparative politics debates on inequality, political preferences, and the collapse of the Left. Although working-class resentment has frequently been blamed for the rise in far-right and authoritarian parties and political movements across the Western world, Rueda’s and Stegmueller’s findings suggest that this blame is misplaced: rising racial heterogeneity and immigration do not appear to move the poor’s preferences away from redistributive parties but rather have a much greater impact on swaying the rich away from pro-redistributive parties. In this regard, these results propose that prior theories of economic voting are not subordinate to recent cultural theories of voting; rather, these two theories interact in complex ways that have more important (and varied) implications for society’s well-being.
Although Who Wants What? robustly examines the causes of redistributive preferences, it raises some questions that it does not adequately answer. Crucially, it raises questions over how political scientists can properly conceptualize expected income. To estimate this, the authors use the Mincer earning function (a widely accepted empirical method in labor economics), which examines how income evolves over the life cycle for different levels of education. However, this model largely describes expected income as a function of one’s highest level of education and “work experience” (proxied via age), and when the authors empirically estimate these variables with panel data, they allow individual-specific effects and individual-specific returns to education to do a lot of the heavy lifting. What makes this problematic is that these individual-specific controls potentially include anything unique to an individual that is not their formal education or level of work experience (i.e., their “competitiveness” on the job market, the ease with which they can switch professions, their confidence in their labor mobility, and the ease with which they can be mobile, etc.). Although one can argue that it is not the point to guess what these characteristics are but rather to use them to provide a final estimate of expected income, they make it difficult to explain why expected income has such a sharper negative impact on redistributive preferences than current income itself.
The book also raises major aggregation questions with regard to its findings on the interaction between material self-interest and inequality. One of the authors’ main points is that inequality forces the rich to care about redistribution. However, if this is the case, why do we observe that highly unequal countries (the United States and United Kingdom) and highly unequal regions within them (prominently states in the US Southeast), consistently deliver conservative, anti-redistributive governments? One may expect that this disconnect is driven by heterogeneity—racial/ethnic heterogeneity may drive economic inequality because of gross social inequities between races and ethnicities—but the authors indicate that “there is no clear relation between heterogeneity and inequality in the data we analyze” (p. 159); they find that heterogeneity’s interaction with income survives even after accounting for economic inequality. It would have been nice for the authors to further demonstrate whether inequality’s interactive effect with income was also conditioned on the level of racial/ethnic heterogeneity within society (i.e., the rich are more supportive of redistribution in more economically unequal societies, but only if these societies are homogeneous). If they had done so, their results would go even further in explaining the presence of anti-redistributive governments in highly unequal regions.
Despite these shortcomings, Who Wants What? is a definitive account of what drives individuals’ demands for redistributive policies. To my knowledge, no other book on redistribution comes close to the rigor of testing these arguments with such a diversity of data sources that contain such a wide range of national (and regional) variation in capitalist democracies. It is a must-read for students and scholars interested in contemporary debates on inequality and the role of the state in rectifying it.
