some countries but not in others making it difficult to conclude that there is a socialist legacy in attitudes for the group as a whole.

Second, are there systematic differences between post-socialist countries and if so, do they fall along familiar ‘fault lines’? In particular, do attitudes differ systematically between Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union? As the opening paragraph illustrates, many countries in Eastern Europe are characterized by lower income (consumption) inequality, which is related in part to higher levels of redistributive public spending. Is this pattern of redistribution consistent with underlying preferences? Our results show that it is. Even when controlling for other factors residents of the former Soviet Union profess significantly lower preference for equality than their counterparts in Eastern Europe. What is interesting - and a little surprising - is that they also profess lower preference for equality than the denizens of developing countries. The socialist legacy - if there was ever one - has long since evaporated.

Finally, how have attitudes evolved over time? We find no evidence of change in attitudes in the post-socialist countries since the mid-1990s and on a more restricted sample since the early 1990s. This sets apart our findings from previous work. The majority of studies on attitudes towards equality are cross-sectional in nature, examining differences at a point in time across countries or individuals. A few however look at changes over time. The ones that do suggest that people’s preferences may evolve over time to favor _less_ equal outcomes. For example, Blanchflower and Freeman (1997) and Verwiebe and Wegener (2000) present evidence to suggest that even though residents of post-socialist countries may inherit preferences which are influenced by the egalitarian values of the past, these are likely to be eroded over time in response to actual increases in inequality. In our results we find no evidence of such a negative time trend in preference for equality.

The rest of the paper is structured as follows. The next section (Section 2) provides a brief overview of the socialist legacy literature. Section 3 explores the data on attitudes towards equality from the _World Values Survey_ using graphs and tables while Section 4 presents the detailed econometric specification. Section 5 presents the main results from the most recent wave of the data. Section 6 discusses how attitudes appear to have evolved over time. Section 7 presents results based on alternative estimates of preferences while Section 8 concludes.

# **2 Attitudes to equality: what do we know?**

The literature on attitudes to inequality in post-socialist countries – summarized in Table 1 - has two main strands.

In the first, the emphasis is on whether attitudes to equality systematically differ between post-socialist countries and established market economies. The premise of these studies is that if people living in post-socialist countries are significantly more in favor of income equality (and thus significantly more averse to income inequality) than those living in the West, then this could represent a significant attitudinal barrier to policy reforms, especially those of the kind that are likely to raise inequality. Shiller, Boycko and Korobov (1991) considered attitudes towards income inequality along with other ‘market-oriented’ 4