Preferences for Redistribution: Two Decades of Gender Gaps and Generational Differences in Europe

We provide a concise overview of the literature concerning the factors influencing preferences for redistribution, with particular attention to works that have integrated considerations of gender and/or cohort heterogeneity into their analyses. We then present a series of stylized facts on preferences for redistribution based on data from the European Social Survey for a wide array of European countries over the period spanning from 2002 to 2022. We document that, since 2002, the average preferences for redistribution have increased. While the gender gap has remained substantially unchanged, the generational gap has widened over time. Distinguishing women and men by a set of individual characteristics, instead, there exists a not negligible heterogeneity both ‘between’ and ‘within’ women and men. At the country level, the overall gender gap in preferences for redistribution increases as the country’s per capita income or gender equality increase. Conversely, the gender gap decreases in more income, unequal, and religious countries. Finally, looking at the two exogenous shocks, that is, the 2008 financial and economic crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic, we observe that average individual attitudes towards redistribution react to both events but in a surprisingly opposite way, with a relevant heterogeneity across different sub-groups of women and men.