Are Policy Preferences Really Motivated by Economic Self-Interest? Personal Finances and Preferences for Redistribution in 30 Countries.

This analysis probes the relationship between people's preferences for redistribution and their economic self-interest. We analyze personal finance and political opinion data from 30 countries included in the 2009 ISSP to analyze whether respondents' personal income, financial wealth, or housing wealth are related to their opinions about economic redistribution, poor aid, and unemployment support. Although we find some very modest evidence of a relationship between income and preferences in liberal welfare states, and between home equity, financial wealth, and preferences in Nordic countries, the limited evidence of broader patterns within our data and the small effect sizes of personal finance measures call into question the importance of these metrics for politics as they are portrayed in popular media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]