Understanding public beliefs about equality, inequality, and meritocracy

Description du projet

Qui s’inquiète de l’inégalité des revenus?

La richesse et les inégalités de revenus ont atteint des niveaux qui n’avaient plus été vus depuis la Grande Dépression, une période de très grande disparité entre les personnes riches et pauvres. Une enquête d’opinion publique réalisée depuis les années 1980 révèle toutefois une faible croissance de l’inquiétude du grand public. Pourquoi la concentration de la richesse dans les mains de quelques‑uns ne suscite‑t‑elle pas la consternation du grand public? Le projet UnEquality, financé par l’UE, étudie la perception des personnes des inégalités économiques et les facteurs qui suscitent l’inquiétude. Combinant des méthodologies de la sociologie, des sciences politiques et des sciences de la communication, il se concentre sur les informations tacites, les hypothèses et les expériences qui sous‑tendent les croyances des personnes concernant les inégalités. Il s’agit de savoir dans quelles conditions les personnes sont susceptibles de rester fidèles à leurs convictions ou de changer d’avis.

Objectif

The concentration of income and wealth has reached a level not seen since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Commentators see the topic’s salience reflected in the political turmoil of the Brexit vote and Donald Trump’s elections. A careful scrutiny of the public opinion record however tells a different story: despite the reality of growing economic inequality since the 1980s, there is little evidence of growing public consternation. In fact, across the western world, greater levels of inequality have gone hand-in-hand with lower levels of concerns.

The proposed project is a mixed-methods investigation into the causes and consequences of this disconnect between the reality of economic inequality and what people believe to be true. Its starting point is the interdisciplinary body of research that has taken up the task to describe people’s (mis)perceptions of inequality and explore interventions to bring the public’s beliefs in closer alignment with reality. This project brings three innovations by combining sociological, political science and communication science methodologies: (1) contextualized analysis of belief formation through naturalistic deliberation and conversation rather than individual questionnaires, in order to better approximate the social process through which people develop an understanding of the world around them; (2) comprehensive description of people’s lay beliefs about economic inequality and its underlying causes, bringing state-of-the-art correlational class analysis to a research body dominated by ordinary least-square regression models; and (3) a population-based experimental test of causal mechanisms through which people’s beliefs about inequality may be changed.

In sum, the research objective is to analyze (a) what people’s beliefs about inequality are, (b) what kind of information, assumptions or experience they are based on, and (c) whether and how they are likely to change when confronted with new and/or contradictory information.