# **6 The evolution of attitudes over time**

We now turn to an analysis of trends in preferences over time. If we look at all countries, and not just former transition economies, the three waves of the World Values Survey suggest that over the 1990s there has been a small but significant shift in preferences towards greater equality. On average, on a scale from 1 to 10 where 1 indicates a preference for greater equality and 10 greater inequality, scores fell from 6.8 in the 1990 wave to 5.8 in 1999-2001.

Inference is however made difficult by the fact that country composition has changed over the waves, with countries being added over time. If we focus only on countries which are repeated in each of the waves, while inference is more straightforward, we are confined to a smaller sample of countries. The smaller sample, too, suggests that there has been a shift in preferences towards greater equality. The shift is largely driven by shift in preferences in developing countries. Preferences in other groups have moved marginally, if at all, also in favor of greater equality. These shifts have not changed the relative preferences across country groupings, with CEE showing a stronger preference for equality than the CIS, and the Baltics somewhere in between.

We now examine conditional trends over time by replicating the analysis in Table 3. As mentioned previously country coverage varies across waves. As coefficients may vary either due to differences in preferences or due to changes in the country composition of the sample, we need to maintain the same countries in the sample over time. In order to do this we consider two distinct samples (see Appendix Table 1 for details):

- (i) “Panel-2”  which includes countries represented in both the 1995-97 and 19992001 waves; and

- (iii)        “Panel-3” which includes countries represented in all three waves (1990, 199597 and 1999-2001).

As there were no countries from the former Soviet Union outside of the Baltics in the 1990 wave, “Panel-3” is not useful for addressing one of our main hypotheses, namely, that these countries display a weaker preference for inequality than Central and Eastern Europe. In addition, this sample includes a single CEE country (Poland). The inference, which can be drawn for the period of the 1990s as a whole, is therefore somewhat limited. With this caveat on sample size and composition in mind, we use the “Panel-2” and “Panel3” samples to replicate the equation in Table 3 column 3. Table 4 presents our findings.

We first consider the period from the mid 1990s to the late 1990s using the “Panel2” sample. As Table 4 suggests, preferences for equality in post-socialist economies remained largely stable over this period, with the possible exception of CEE. Countries of the former Soviet Union maintained a stronger preference for income inequality relative to advanced economies over this period. At the same time, relative to advanced economies, countries in Central and Eastern Europe also maintained a stronger preference for income inequality, although this effect is not statistically significant in 1999-01 and is weaker than the preference for income inequality among countries of the former Soviet Union. The Baltic republics lie somewhere in between the two groups.

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