Preferences for Redistribution: a European Comparative Analysis, Working Paper

The paper aims to determine who supports the Welfare State in Europe and who would benefit from a shrinking of the European social model. The assumption underlying this research is that the evolution of social policies in Europe and the differences that persist across Eu-ropean countries are pushed by the changing risk aversion of agents, depending mainly on their employment status. Controlling for a num-ber of factors usually found to impact individual preferences in the literature, our empirical study takes the egoistic motives for redistri-bution seriously. We thus try to estimate the relative importance of socioeconomic factors in terms of current and expected gain, taking into account social mobility experience and risk aversion. Using ISSP survey data for four European countries, our cross-country economet-ric analysis confirms the importance of a pure revenue effect on pref-erences. But importantly, the social background of individuals can somehow temper this effect. Moreover, the intensity of the latter is shown to differ from one country to another