Tax the élites! The role of economic inequality and conspiracy beliefs on attitudes towards taxes and redistribution intentions

Tax the élites! The role of economic inequality and conspiracy beliefs on attitudes towards taxes and redistribution intentions. Bruno Gabriel Salvador Casara et al. British Journal of Social Psychology, June 27 2022. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjso.12555

Abstract: Taxation is one of the most widely acknowledged strategies to reduce inequality, particularly if based on progressivity. In a high-powered sample study (N = 2119) we investigated economic inequality and conspiracy beliefs as two key predictors of tax attitude and support for progressive taxation. We found that participants in the high economic inequality condition had lower levels of tax compliance and higher levels of conspiracy beliefs and support for progressive taxation. Furthermore, the effect of the experimental condition on tax compliance was mediated by conspiracy beliefs. Finally, conspiracy belief scores were positively associated with support for progressive taxation. Our results provide evidence that attitudes towards taxation are not monolithic but change considering the aims and targets of specific taxes. Indeed, while the perception of economic inequality prompts the desire for equal redistribution, it also fosters conspiracy narratives that undermine compliance with taxes.

DISCUSSION

In a high-powered study, we investigated economic inequality and conspiracy beliefs as two key predictors of tax attitude and support for progressive taxation.

Besides confirming previous evidence according to economic inequality increases conspiracy beliefs (Salvador Casara et al., 2022), the key novelty of our research lies in studying the impact of economic inequality and socio-economic class on both the appraisal of taxes as a value and the support for redistribution, two constructs that in the current literature have been studied in independent lines of studies. While taxation, especially if based on progressivity, is a fundamental strategy to tackle inequality, we found that people in more unequal contexts are in general more tax-averse, creating a vicious inequality-fostering spiral. However, our results suggest that this aversion is related mainly to attitude towards taxation when framed in general terms, whereas participants in the high unequal scenario were more prone to specifically support progressive taxation. These results suggest that the perceived value of taxation in general, and support for progressive taxation in particular, are distinct constructs, a distinction further corroborated by their low correlation. Specifically, the value of general taxation refers to the perceived importance and significance of paying taxes. As unequal contexts trigger conspiracy beliefs, this value is undermined, plausibly because of conspiratorial assumptions that the collected money will probably be used for negative and immoral aims. Indeed, this interpretation is in line with the observed mediated pattern of the effect of economic inequality on positive attitudes towards taxes via conspiracy beliefs. This mediational pattern was not observed for support for progressive taxation, which was directly triggered by inequality and independently associated with conspiracy beliefs. In order to try to understand these results, it is important to note that while people tend to be averse to economic inequality and that perceiving economic inequality promotes collective actions aimed to reduce economic inequality (García-Castro et al., 2020; García-Sánchez et al., 2020), it also fosters conspiracy beliefs, interpersonal and political distrust (Goubin et al., 2021; Salvador Casara et al., 2022; Uslaner & Brown, 2005). Thus, highlighting the redistributive role of taxation represents the key factor in understanding how different attitudes towards taxes are related to different psychological processes rooted in the perception of economic inequality. Specifically, when taxes are not framed as progressive and then their redistributive function is not salient, participants assume that taxes are just a penalizing cost, and conspiracy beliefs may play a role in perceiving taxes as public money wasted by a corrupted and untrustworthy élite. Differently, when the redistributive function of taxes is specifically stressed, people based their attitudes towards these policies on contextual inequality, as in the condition of high inequality all respondents tended to favour this redistribution means. This result is striking as the induced perception of inequality suppressed the association between conspiratorial beliefs and aversion to progressive taxation. In other words, even people that endorse conspiracy beliefs, and who are generally averse to taxes and with a stronger vision of taxes as a penalization, are more likely to support progressive taxation when the situation is presented as highly unequal. One possible explanation is that progressive taxations are perceived as a penalization for members of the wealthiest groups, namely the elite to be conspiratorially blamed for the unequal situation.

Indeed, the independent path that links conspiracy beliefs to support a progressive tax system is coherent with the fact that higher progressivity implies targeting élites, which are pointed to as the cause of social problems by conspiracy believers (Castanho Silva et al., 2017). Coherently, conspiracy beliefs are associated with far-left and far-right political orientation, and with populist attitudes (Castanho Silva et al., 2017; Imhoff et al., 2022), which are particularly linked to political parties advocating redistribution and anti-neoliberalism sentiment (Ganev, 2017; Hogan & Haltinner, 2015). This may suggest the necessity to disentangle economic and social conservatism when studying their relationship with conspiracy beliefs.

Finally, results did not provide evidence for an interaction between economic inequality conditions and social economic class, neither considering social class as an experimentally assigned status nor self-perceived socio-economic standing. This pattern can be interpreted in at least two possible ways. First, because conspiracy beliefs refer to theories that involve members of a small élite, it is unlikely that this élite is included in the high-class group. Thus, it is possible that even when people perceive themselves as wealthy, they still do not self-identify with the powerful and potentially conspiratorial élite. This, therefore, maintains every respondent passible of referring to the conspiratorial elite as an outgroup, leaving little space for cross-modal effects. A second process that may explain why each class is similarly affected by economic inequality regards system justifying mechanisms, which characterize both minority and majority groups (Jost et al., 2004). Previous evidence suggests that high inequality is generally associated with the tendency to justify and, therefore, maintain the status quo (Du & King, 2021; Goudarzi et al., 2020). This process may be in action across all respondents, explaining why inequality does not interact with social class.

Limitations and future directions

It is important to acknowledge that the use of the Bimboola Paradigm is not without limitations. Indeed, the fictitious society cannot accurately simulate the complexity of real-world societies. We, therefore, suggest future research to investigate this phenomenon using other research methods (e.g. big data or qualitative methods) in order to better understand these dynamics in real life. Moreover, we also recommend exploring the impact of economic inequality on conspiracy beliefs and tax preferences in countries with different levels of actual economic inequality, in order to capture the subtle nuances of this phenomenon. Another limitation related to the paradigm we implemented refers to the fact that the economic inequality condition and the assigned socio-economic class condition may not be fully orthogonal. Indeed, participants in the low- and high-class conditions had different choices among the high- and low economic inequality condition, whereas the middle class condition was the only one identical for both high- and low economic inequality conditions. However, the fact that we did not find any interaction between the assigned socio-economic class condition and the economic inequality condition suggests that the impact of the assigned socio-economic class is similar in both inequality conditions. Given the big sample we have, we were able to analyse respondents assigned to the middle class (N = 725) as an unifactorial design with two experimental conditions, inequality versus equality and inspecting the role of their perceived social standing. Results confirm that economic inequality still differently affected tax attitudes and support for progressive taxation, with social class having a main effect, and no interaction with inequality (see Supporting Information).

This paradigm also has relevant strengths. In fact, it allows us to isolate the effect of economic inequality on conspiracy beliefs and tax attitudes, and to remove potentially confounding variables that naturally covary with social status; hence this paradigm allowed us to infer a causal relationship between the investigated variables. The use of a fictional scenario also avoids ethical concerns related to giving false feedback about the level of economic inequalities. Moreover, it allows isolating effects related to potential a priori perceptions related to the actual level of inequality of a real country. Finally, the findings obtained in Bimboola are typically aligned with findings from correlational or field studies (see for example Salvador Casara et al., 2022; Sprong et al., 2019).

Given its flexibility, future studies may apply this paradigm to manipulate other societal features that have important consequences for political attitudes. For example, it would be suitable to manipulate the ethnic diversity of a fictitious society, a factor that undermines trust and support for welfare policies (Edo et al., 2019; van der Meer et al., 2020). Attitudes towards general and specific policies could, therefore, be assessed in order to extend the present findings to different domains both in terms of societal features and practical implications.

Finally, caution is necessary for the interpretation of the mediation models. Although the rationale for using them was justified in the introduction, statistical models per se cannot provide evidence for causality (see, Fiedler et al., 2018).

IMPLICATIONS AND CONCLUSION

These findings provide important information about the challenges in tackling economic inequality. In particular, our study suggests at least two ways to effectively address economic inequality. First, increasing the awareness of inequality and presenting the entity of the phenomenon (which in our societies is closer to the high inequality than to the low inequality condition) may be an educational strategy to increase support for progressive taxation, even among people who are generally highly averse, such as people that endorse conspiracy beliefs. However, this strategy is to be cautiously applied, as the perception of high inequality also triggers conspiracy views, which fire back on taxation in general. The second type of strategy could, therefore, tackle conspiracy beliefs with indirect or direct interventions. In order to improve tax compliance in societies characterized by high levels of economic inequality, governments and institutions should aim their policies and their communication at indirectly reducing conspiracy beliefs by boosting trust (van Mulukom et al., 2020). For example, improving transparency can reduce the power asymmetry between institutions and citizens, and increase the accountability of governments, and the perceived legitimacy of their power (Brusca et al., 2018). Another intervention could be to directly tackle conspiracy theories, by both inoculating scepticism against conspiratorial narratives, and debunking conspiratorial information (Brashier et al., 2021; Jolley & Douglas, 2017; Salvador Casara et al., 2019).

Finally, it is important to consider that these strategies are likely to be safely used by a wide portion of the population, as the observed pattern was not moderated by both assigned and self-attributed socio-economic class.

Our results contribute to the understanding of the social basis that hinders inequality reduction, providing evidence that attitudes towards taxation are not monolithic, but change considering the aims and targets of specific taxes. Governments and policy-makers may take advantage of this research in order to implement context-specific tax policies that help tackle tax evasion and economic inequality.