Seminar series It’s not me, it’s you Redistributive preferences and fairness Add to calendar 2025-10-30 17:00 2025-10-30 18:30 Europe/Rome It’s not me, it’s you Seminar Room 2 Badia Fiesolana YYYY-MM-DD Print Share: Share on Facebook Share on BlueSky Share on X Share on LinkedIn Send by email Scheduled dates Oct 30 2025 17:00 - 18:30 CET Seminar Room 2, Badia Fiesolana Organised by Department of Political and Social Sciences In the context of the Comparative Politics Seminar Series, this session features a presentation by David Rueda (University of Oxford). Fairness and deservingness are core principles for the formation of public policy, and yet little consensus exists about how meritocracy should influence redistributive policies such as a generous welfare state or social protection. On the one hand, some policies designed to ensure equal representation in education, employment, and government are perceived as corrective measures for differences in opportunity or for societal injustice. On the other, these same policies can be perceived as unfair given they come into direct conflict with meritocracy. Although classical economic theory suggests that preferences for redistribution are simply a function of economic self-interest, a large body of recent work including theoretical models, empirical evidence, and experiments has shown that preferences are a complex mosaic incorporating both selfish and other-regarding considerations. While an influential literature has shown that individuals condition their policy preferences on their views of fairness and deservingness (as a function of how earnings are determined), none of the existing work accounts for the reality that outcomes may be meritocratic for some but not others. To close this gap, we present results from a lab experiment representing the first causal investigation of redistributive preferences in the presence of asymmetric earnings conditions. Although we find little evidence that asymmetry as a general characteristic affects redistributive preferences, we find strong evidence that fairness considerations are asymmetric. Our results suggest that redistributive preferences are only malleable for the rich and that their views of deservingness are determined solely by the conditions of the poor. Further, our findings suggest that fairness considerations are reference dependent and counterfactual beliefs are an important moderator of the relationship between fairness and redistributive preferences.