Where I stand and what I stand for: Subjective status, class, and redistribution

While research is increasingly focusing on the political influence of subjective social status, it is yet unclear how the latter shapes attitudes towards redistribution on its own, nor how it interacts with contextual inequality. To address this, we integrate perspectives across sociology, political economy, and social psychology, testing competing hypotheses of polarisation vs. mitigation of redistributive attitudes among social groups. We rely on ISSP data for twenty-five countries across the Americas, Asia, Europe, and Oceania between 1987 and 2019, exploiting the longitudinal potential of contextual information. Results show that individuals with lower subjective status display higher support for redistribution and perception of inequality, independently from their objective characteristics. Contextual inequality plays a key role: in countries with higher income inequalities, high subjective status individuals show higher support for redistributive policies. This suggests that, in highly unequal countries, individuals who feel they are above most of the population display pro-redistribution attitudes in line with the rest of the population. The results have broad implications, suggesting that an approach to social stratification that considers both subjective and objective aspects is central to illuminate support for redistribution.