Social Mobility and Support for Redistribution: Separating the American Dream from Policy Preferences

This study examines the extent to which upward social mobility impacts beliefs about inequality and preferences for redistribution and taxation. A novel survey experiment and analysis of two national surveys (1993-2012) establish that there is little to no relationship between perceived or actual rates of social mobility and an individual's preferences for redistribution, taxation of the rich, or a variety of other policies examined, like educational spending. Despite this, local social mobility has a significant relationship with preferences for the Republican party in a county-level analysis of Presidential electoral results from 1980 to 2016, where the strong relationship between social mobility and Republican party preference surpasses that of income and income inequality and is robust to numerous specifications including population weighting, state fixed effects and an extensive battery of control variables. The connection with partisanship rather than policy is confirmed in the national survey data and the survey experiment. Importantly, this partisan effect does not interact with income: regardless of their own income, individuals are more Republican wherever low-income children do well. Finally, rather than universal overestimation, new survey evidence suggests that Americans possess relatively accurate perceptions of local rates of economic mobility. Together, these results provide an empirical rebuttal to conventional models of the Meltzer-Richard voting framework and its prospect of upward mobility (POUM) variant, which argues that preferences for redistribution depend on beliefs about future gains or losses from taxation. Instead, this evidence suggests that attitudes toward redistribution and related policies are not strongly impacted by beliefs in upward economic mobility, which implies that resistance to greater redistribution may not be driven by unmerited belief in the ‘American dream.'