Americans support policies designed to raise earnings more than tax-funded benefits programs

What is it about?

Most Americans say they want less inequality, but fewer support government programs designed to reduce it. Why? Our research shows the answer depends on which policies you ask about. Some government policies are designed to reduce inequality through taxes and government programs, for example, through safety net policies funded by progressive tax systems. Researchers call these policies redistributive. Other policies are designed to reduce inequality by increasing the earnings of lower-income people, for example, by increasing the minimum wage. Researchers call these policies “predistributive.” This article by The New York Times shows how this distinction informs policy debates. We studied how much Americans support policies of each type. In an analysis of 31 nationally representative U.S. survey waves conducted from 2015 to 2024, involving 384,248 respondents, we found Americans expressed more support, on average, for predistributive policies. To isolate the impact of how policies are described, we ran an experiment with a separate sample of 1,009 U.S. adults. Participants all evaluated six policies (e.g., the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and Medicare for All Who Want It). The basic features of each policy were briefly described. We then randomly varied whether each policy was described as raising the earnings of people with lower incomes (predistribution), shifting resources from people with higher incomes to people with lower incomes (redistribution), or had no additional wording (the control condition). Policies described as predistributive received more support than policies described as redistributive, and this effect was stronger among Republican study participants. Varying the policy descriptions further clarified the pattern. Predistributive policy descriptions received about the same level of support as did the control condition policy descriptions, while redistributive policy descriptions received less support than either, on average. These findings suggest the difference in support between these two categories of policies results primarily from a redistributive policy penalty, rather than a predistributive policy boost.

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Photo by Kamil on Unsplash

Photo by Kamil on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Our results offer evidence that policies designed to reduce inequality through taxes and government benefit programs tend to be supported less by Americans than are policies designed to reduce inequality prior to government taxes and transfers. Further, the research shows this pattern both in surveys of policies with inherently different features, and also in an experiment that held constant policy features while varying policy descriptions. These findings caution against treating Americans’ support for policies designed to reduce inequality as reflecting a single logic. Attending to larger policy features - like a policy's apparent predistributive-vs.-redistributive approach to reducing inequality - can help policy analysts, citizens, policymakers, and advocates understand why some proposals attract more support than others. We also note some caveats. Our survey analysis draws on questions written by many different research groups, so the policies varied both in what they actually do to reduce inequality and in how the questions described them. To better isolate the effect of description, our experiment held each policy's features constant, varying only how the policy was presented. The experiment tested only six policies (the EITC, Federal Minimum Wage Increase, Progressive Income Taxation, the PRO Act, Medicare for All Who Want It, and America's College Promise Act). Other policies, wordings, or contexts could shift the patterns we observed.

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