as a reflection of past effort, or merit, or both. The unemployed are found to have a greater preference for equality than the employed perhaps owing to their disadvantage in the labor market. The self-employed, on the hand, often see higher incomes as a reward for effort and risk taking and therefore have lower preference for income equality.

The WVS has information on age, gender, number of children, marital status, education, income and labor market status. Age is measured in years. Educational attainment is measured in terms of four levels of education–-primary, secondary (technical or vocational), secondary (general), and university–-with information on whether the level was completed or was incomplete. Income status which is self-declared is either lower income, middle income or higher income. Labor market status can be: full time employee (30 or more hours a week), part time employee (less than 30 hours a week), self-employed, retired, or other. In the specification adopted for the analysis, the impact of variables such as gender, education, income and labor market status is assessed relative to a middle income, full-time employed, male with completed primary education (the default group).

At the country level, we include data on per-capita GDP and the prevailing level of inequality. Per capita GDP is measured in PPP terms (2000) while income inequality is measured by the Gini coefficient. Because data on the Gini is not typically available on an annual basis, we use the average Gini for the 1990 to 2002 period. Data are drawn from the World Development Indicators (WDI) database.

We also allow for variation among countries and country-groups using dummies. We begin by using dummies for each country. Then to consider whether there is a distinct pattern among all post-socialist countries in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union we treat them as as a block. Finally, we consider distinct country groups within post-socialist countries as suggested by Table 2. Our first group consists of the countries of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) where we expect to find a higher preference for equality. The second group consists of countries of former Soviet Union (CIS) where we expect to find a lower preference for inequality. The Baltic republics are somewhat hard to classify, so we create a distinct group for them. In the specifications with individual country dummies the U.S. is the default country. Where country group dummies are used the default is the group of Advanced Economies. A full list of countries that fall into different groups may be found in Appendix Table 1.<sup>7</sup> In the analysis that follows we typically consider all countries and individuals for which we have a complete set of data (both left and right hand side variables). The WVS also includes a few sub-national units which are not appropriate for our analysis. These units were excluded from the analysis.<sup>8</sup> As country coverage varies by wave, trends over time may reflect both changes in preferences and changes in the country composition of the sample. For the trend analysis we therefore focus on countries which are represented in each of the waves.

> 7 It should be noted that for the purposes of our analysis South Korea and Singapore are classified as developing countries as they were not classified in international statistical publications as “Advanced Economies” till 1997 which is well into the period under consideration.

> 8 The following units were deleted: Northern Ireland and Puerto Rico (1990, 1995-97, 1999-2001); Tambov, Moscow, Basque, Andalusia, Galicia, & Valencia (1990, 1995-97).

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