Changing Public Attitudes to Inequality, Poverty and Redistribution: Longitudinal Analysis Collaborative Project with the Scottish Government.

The Scottish Government has a strong anti-poverty policy agenda, based on social investment and inclusive growth (Scottish Government, 2013, 2015), and is committed to ending child poverty and reducing inequality (Child Poverty (Scotland) Act 2017). Much of this agenda is backed by all parties in the Scottish Parliament. Indeed, inequality is now a global concern. Goal 10 of the UN's Sustainable Development Goals calls on governments around the world to take urgent action to reduce inequality. Yet the UK has relatively high levels of poverty and inequality for a rich country, while little progress has been made in recent years to reduce them. Scotland has not been immune from this pattern, albeit it has taken advantage of the devolution of income tax to introduce a somewhat more progressive set of bands and rates (Scotland Act 2016), while the coronavirus pandemic has revived a long-standing debate about the relationship between inequality and health.
Further governmental action is therefore likely to be necessary in future if poverty and inequality are to be reduced. Yet the legitimacy and effectiveness of such action will depend in part at least on public consent and support for policies that promote a fairer and more equal society. The proposed studentship would utilise the rich legacy of data on the subject that has been collected by the British Social Attitudes survey since 1983 and the parallel Scottish Social Attitudes survey since 1999, which will be combined to undertake a comprehensive study of the sources of support and opposition to policies designed to reduce poverty and inequality. The study would be informed by the key theoretical perspectives in the current academic literature. It would expand and update the previous analysis that Scottish Government Analytical Services published in 2015.
Rational theory would suggest that who supports and who opposes redistribution and other measures to reduce poverty and inequality is relatively straightforward - those towards the bottom of the pile in terms of income and wealth can be expected to support such measures while those who are relatively well off will be inclined to oppose them. This suggests that the pursuit of measures to reduce poverty and inequality is always likely to be divisive, and be the subject of social and political disagreement, while those with high incomes and wealth may engage in behaviours that will frustrate the policy.
However, recent academic research suggests that this picture is too stark. In particular, inequality has social effects (such as increased crime and insecurity) that are of greater concern to the better off than the utility that they derive from a marginal increase in material assets. Consequently, attitudes towards redistributive policies may have a curvilinear relationship with income and wealth, whereby in highly unequal societies support tends be highest towards the top and the bottom of the income and wealth distributions.
At the same time, research has also indicated that attitudes towards welfare and other anti-poverty measures are also influenced by notions of desert, whereby some of those who are in receipt of support (such as people with disabilities) are regarded as more 'deserving' of support than others (such as single-parents). Such notions of desert tend to be more common among those who have a socially conservative outlook - who tend to have lower levels of educational attainment and thus incomes. At the same time, we cannot assume that those who are less well-off are necessarily aware of the extent of inequality in their society. In short, there are reasons why support for anti-poverty measures is not necessarily as high as we might anticipate.
Between them these considerations suggest that attitudes towards welfare depend not just on material circumstance but also social perceptions and values - and that the character and distribution of these cannot be taken for granted and may vary over time and between pl