At the “Inequality and …?” lectures series held by the Université du Luxembourg, the Stone Center’s Leslie McCall presented a framework for understanding how, in the United States, public opinions about inequality, economic opportunity, and redistribution are related to one another in ways that are at odds with key tenets of American exceptionalism, such as American dream and free market ideologies. The framework posits that Americans connect rising and high levels of economic inequality to a restriction of economic opportunities that in turn motivates support for opportunity-enhancing policies (e.g., in education and employment). McCall and collaborators test this model using survey experiments and new survey questions in nationally representative surveys, including, for comparative purposes, in Sweden and Denmark.
The purpose of the “Inequality and …?” lectures series is to provide a forum where the research community, the private and public sectors and the general public in Luxembourg can gather around a theme which researchers have traditionally associated with this country, namely, income studies in a broad sense. The Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) was created in 1983. LIS has become the leading cross-sectional database of micro-economic income data for social science research. Today it benefits from a worldwide reputation.
Full slide presentation (PDF)