This research is an exploration of the underlying ‘drivers’ of public attitudes towards economic inequality and welfare policy.

The project was supported by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.

The report for this project has now been published, and is available from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation's website.

The lead researchers for the project were Tim Horton, Research Director of the Fabian Society, and Louise Bamfield, Senior Research Fellow. Jordan Tchilingirian worked as a research assistant on the project.

Research summary

Much research on UK public attitudes to economic inequality and welfare policy has tended to focus more on revealing attitudes than exploring what motivates them, potentially limiting its use to policymakers and advocates wanting to understand how the public might respond to new policies or arguments. This exploratory research aimed to investigate some of the underlying ‘drivers’ of these attitudes, and fill in some of the gaps in existing research in ways that might provide useful insights for both practitioners and policymakers.

In particular, the research investigated:

* people’s attitudes to the income gap, and their attitudes towards those at both ‘top’ and ‘bottom’ of the income spectrum;

* people’s attitudes towards policy responses to economic inequality, including on pay, tax and benefits, as well as public service interventions to improve opportunities for disadvantaged groups;

* the underlying ‘drivers’ of these attitudes, focussing in particular on the values and distributive norms that underpin judgements about fairness, as well as the perspectives from which people make such judgements;

* the existence and distribution of distinct attitudes towards economic inequality within the population; and

* how different groups respond to particular arguments for and against tackling inequality, and the components around which a public consensus for tackling inequality might be built.

While over the last 25 years a consistent majority of respondents in the British Social Attitudes Survey (BSAS) have described the income gap as too big (with over 70 per cent reporting this view since 1983), evidence suggests that there is weak public support for government action to narrow the gap. The question of why people are reluctant to support redistribution, despite apparently widespread unease about inequality, is one of the key questions addressed in this research.

These issues are particularly relevant at the present time, when economic inequality remains at its highest level for three decades and when turbulence on the global financial markets and an economic recession have raised more pointed questions about the fairness of the income gap. The research also explored how public attitudes might have been affected by the credit crunch.

The project ran from June 2008 to March 2009. The fieldwork comprised:

* a series of deliberative focus groups, including three full-day deliberative workshops, undertaken July 2008 - January 2009 in four different UK cities.
* two large-scale surveys, with data collected and analysed by YouGov, undertaken 28th November - 1st December 2008 (2,044 adults) and 3rd - 5th February 2009 (3,316 adults).

This research forms part of a wider Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) programme on public interest in poverty, which considers attitudes towards poverty and its implications for building public support for action on UK poverty eradication. JRF commissioned the study following a review of existing literature on attitudes to economic inequality, which surfaced the apparent contradiction between public dissatisfaction with the income gap in the UK and the lack of support for measures to address it (see: Orton, M. & Rowlingson, K. (2007) Public Attitudes Towards Economic Equality, York: Joseph Rowntree Foundation).

The report for this project has now been published, and is available from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation's website.

Related events

Project launch: What does the public really think about fairness?