Abstract
While economic theory predicts that individuals' relative income position influences their preferences for redistribution, evidence from previous surveys did not find systematic differences in preferences for redistribution between richer and poorer individuals.
Previous research has found that individuals systematically misperceive their own position in the national income distribution and that they change their preferences for redistribution when informed about their true position, but results differ across countries.
In this study, we investigate how wrong beliefs about the position in the national income distribution affect preferences for redistribution, as well as perceptions about the fairness of inequality and the degree of political polarization, in 27 European countries. We also explore potential heterogeneities depending on key background characteristics of respondents, such as the income level and political preferences. We do this by introducing an information-provision experiment in a wave of the Eurobarometer, a representative survey of all 27 countries of the EU.