Females are more egalitarian than men, like left-leaning voters; men are relatively more efficiency minded, like right-leaning voters; left & right extremes are very egalitarian

Fairness Views and Political Preferences -Evidence from a representative sample. Daniel Müller, Sander Renes. Universitaet Innsbruck, Working Papers in Economics and Statistics 2019-08. May 2019. https://www2.uibk.ac.at/downloads/c4041030/wpaper/2019-08.pdf

Abstract: We elicit distributional fairness ideals of impartial spectators using an incentivized elicitation in a large and heterogeneous sample of the German population. We document several empirical facts: i) egalitarianism is the predominant ideal; ii) females are more egalitarian than men; iii) men are relatively more efficiency minded; iv) left-leaning voters are more likely to be egalitarians whereas right-leaning voters are more likely to be efficiency minded; and v) youngand highly-educated participants hold different fairness ideals than the rest of the population. Moreover, we show that the fairness ideals predict preferences for redistribution and intervention by the government, as well as actual charitable giving, even after controlling for a range of covariates. Hence, our paper contributes to our understanding of the underpinnings of voting behavior and ideological preferences, as well the literature that links lab and field behavior.

Keywords: Distributional fairness, impartial spectator, representative sample, po-litical attitudes, voting behavior, lab to field