manageable minimum. By way of contrast, countries of the former Soviet Union may have embraced greater inequality as a part of a strong desire to move away from the former command economy with its host of regulations dampening differences in income, particularly wage-income.

For all these reasons we have reason to believe that preference for greater inequality is likely to be stronger in the former Soviet Union than in Central and Eastern Europe. Whether this “cleavage” is upheld by the data is examined further in the sections below.

# **4 Data and specification**

The country averages presented in Table 2 suggest that post-socialist countries display widely differing attitudes towards income equality. Moreover, a higher preference for equality is more likely to be found in the countries of Eastern Europe than in the former Soviet Union. Is this borne out when we control not just for income and societal levels of inequality, but also the many individual factors that influence the scores?

To probe further we undertake an analysis of the micro-data on individual preferences from the WVS. In line with the rest of the literature, we hypothesize that an individual’s preference for equality is a function of personal characteristics, such as age, education, marital status, number of children, gender, income, and so on, as well as societal factors, such as per-capita income, prevailing levels of inequality and country ‘legacy’. Thus: Pij = f( Xij, Zj, εij), where Pij is a vector of preferences for equality (on a scale of 1 to 10) of individuals i in country j , Xij is vector of personal characteristics, Zj is a vector of country-specific factors, and εij a vector of individual-specific errors.

To estimate the relationship between these variables we use an ordered probit model that explains inequality aversion as a function of individual and country-level characteristics. The model allows for the fact that the variable we are trying to explain is an ordinal variable – reflecting ordering of preferences - rather than a cardinal variable whose value can be used to infer precise strength of preference (we can make no presumption that a score of 4 is twice as strong as a score of 2). In the context of such a model, a positive and statistically significant coefficient on an explanatory variable means that it increases the preference for the highest score 10 (that is, it increases the preference for greater income inequality).

Much of the literature finds age affects preferences such that older people believe more strongly in equality of income than the younger people. This may be related to a number of factors, including greater expectations of state provision of income security in old age. On the other hand, inequality aversion typically falls with educational attainment possibly reflecting the belief of the higher educated that they are more deserving of greater rewards. Women are typically found to have stronger preferences for equality than men. This may represent gender differences in preferences or may reflect an underlying economic condition, such as average job insecurity (Scehve 2005). Those who are relatively well off are found to believe less in income equality, possibly because they see their relative income 10