Soviet Union appear to be robust to alternative questions to elicit preferences. One conclusion that does not appear entirely robust to the change of question is that post-Soviet economies have a greater preference for inequality than the advanced economies – this appears to hold in the common sample (Table 5, column 3) but not in the full sample (Table 5, column 1).

# **8 Implications and conclusions**

Our results taken all together contest the current consensus in the literature. We find little evidence of a socialist legacy _en bloc_ in attitudes to equality. CEE countries are more likely to prefer greater equality compared to the CIS countries, with the Baltic states somewhere in-between. These patterns also appear relatively stable over time. The results also confirm the conventional individual and demographic determinants of preferences for equality. Our results appear to be more or less upheld when we consider an alternative approach to eliciting preferences for a much smaller sample of countries, namely the preference for eliminating inequality.

Our findings do not seem to be unique to the WVS. A newly available source of data, the _Life in Transition Survey (2006)_ , which covers all transition economies in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, also provides evidence of differences in preference for equality across CEE, the Baltics and the countries of the former Soviet Union.<sup>12</sup> On average, Central and Eastern European economies are found to have more egalitarian preferences than their CIS counterparts. The Baltic countries stand out as being distinct from other countries of the former Soviet Union. However, in contrast to the results presented in this paper, this data source suggests that suggest that the Baltics have more egalitarian preferences as a group than CEE countries.

What do the findings in this paper mean for policy? Our findings suggest that in countries of the former Soviet Union there may be little political or social consensus for moving towards greater income equality. Thus, the unequal outcomes observed may not be the consequence of limited administrative capacity of the state to redistribute incomes, or different levels of confidence in ability of the state, but the lack of a political consensus that it should do so. In contrast, in countries in CEE there appears to be greater support for income equality.

The differences between the two groups of countries may simply reflect different means towards a common end. The WVS also seeks respondents’ views on government responsibility for different aspects of economy and society (such as pensions). Although we do not present the results in detail here, our analysis suggests that all residents of postsocialist economies prefer greater government responsibility than their advanced economy counterparts. **Significantly, there is no difference in reported preference for government responsibility between CEE countries and the countries of the former**

> 12 We look at unconditional mean scores for different country groups.  The LITS measure of “preference for equality” is based on responses to the following survey question: To what extent do you agree with the following statement, “The gap between the rich and the poor today in this country should be reduced”, where 1=Strongly disagree, and 5 =Strongly agree.

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