Preferences for Regional Redistribution in Multi-Tiered Politics: The Role of Information and Survey Evidence

What explains individual support for redistribution among regions within a country? Building on extant models, we hypothesize that such preferences are affected by regional income, conditioned by individual income and political ideology. We test hypotheses with an experiment embedded in a nationally representative survey in Spain, where we randomly inform some citizens of the true relative income of their region. The effect of this information is therefore akin to changes in relative regional income. We find that citizens' learning about a region's relative position affects preferences for redistribution; specifically, low-income respondents in relatively well-off regions become particularly against inter-regional redistribution. The effects of regional income are moderated by political ideology and priming of "out group" regions. The findings have implications for debates about the applicability of economic models to explaining support for regional arrangements, and about the role of second-dimensional "identity" politics.This project has been funded by the Càtedra Pasqual Maragall d’Economia i Territori (University of Barcelona), and by the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) (project number: 200910I070). For comments on previous versions of this paper, we thank Sabine Flamand, Mark Kayser, Johannes Lindvall, as well as partici-pants at the MPSA 2013, EPSA 2013, CES 2013 and the Moscow Mini-Conference on Culture, Diversity and Development. The usual disclaimer applies