Students, Not Workers, Let Ideology Shape Redistribution

🧪 How the Experiment Worked

This study used a political-frame-free, lab-in-the-field experiment to examine links between employment status, self-reported political ideology, and preferences for redistribution. Participants completed a real-effort task and then participated in a four-player dictator game. Two treatments manipulated how initial endowments were assigned:

• Earned: endowments depended on performance in the real-effort task (earned earnings).
• Windfall: endowments were randomly determined (windfalls).

📊 What Was Measured

Revealed redistributive preferences were measured via actual allocations in the dictator game, allowing comparison across participant groups (employed, unemployed, students) and across the two endowment treatments.

🔍 Key Findings

• Employment status (employed vs. unemployed) is associated with revealed redistribution choices, but political ideology among employed and unemployed is not associated with those revealed choices.
• For students, revealed redistributive preferences are strongly associated with their self-reported political ideology.
• Employed participants and right-leaning students redistributed less when endowments were earned than when they were windfalls.
• Unemployed participants and left-leaning students showed no meaningful difference in redistribution between earned earnings and windfalls.

⚖️ Why It Matters

The findings indicate that ideological commitment in distributive behavior is concentrated among students: ideology predicts action for students but not for most workers. This has implications for interpreting survey measures of ideology and for theories that connect socioeconomic position and political commitments to preferences over redistribution.