Next, we consider the period of the 1990s using all three waves. As previously mentioned, the number of countries represented in all three waves is small, making it difficult to draw strong conclusions, and the absence of countries from the former Soviet Union precludes an analysis of the differences with Central and Eastern Europe. These caveats notwithstanding, results from Table 4 support our main hypothesis. We find that the post-socialist economies covered in this sample do not as a group display a greater preference for income equality than advanced economies. There is little support for the “socialist” legacy hypothesis.

# **7 Alternative survey questions on preferences for equality**

To conduct our analysis of attitudes to equality we have so far relied on a question that asks respondents to rank their preferences on a ten-digit scale where 1 stands for greater equality and 10 for less equality. The question is asked in a large number of countries, is repeated over time, and has been used in other parts of the literature to elicit information on attitudes to equality. Thus, it is an ideal question for the purposes of our analysis.

Are our findings robust to different ways of eliciting information on attitudes to equality? This is not an easy question to answer owing to data limitations. The 1999-2001 wave of WVS includes one other question, which gets at the same issue in a more roundabout way. It asks respondents to convey their views on what a society—to be considered ‘just’—should provide. In particular, respondents are asked to rank the importance of _eliminating inequality_ on a 5-point scale, from “1” which stands for “Very important” to 5 “Not at all important.” As this question, which we shall call ‘eliminating inequality’ for short, appears to be trying to elicit very similar information as the question used in the analysis so far (the ‘preference for equality’ question), we use the responses to examine whether our findings are robust to a different way of eliciting respondents’ views. Unfortunately, the question was not asked in earlier waves of the WVS, so we cannot use it to examine trends over time.

Table 5 reports the results of estimating the same equation as in Table 3, column 3 using the ‘eliminating inequality’ question. The question is asked of a much smaller sample of countries than the ‘preference for equality’ question. Table 5, Column 1 reports the results from using this smaller sample: the total number of observations (30,454) is around half the total number of observations in the baseline regression of Table 3, column 3 (over 60,000). Comparing results with Table 3 is rendered difficult by differences in country coverage of the two questions. So, as a solution, we also report two further sets of results based on the common sample of countries where both questions were asked. Table 5 columns 2 and 3 report results from using the sample of individuals and countries common to both measures (21,302 observations).

Keeping in mind that lower values of both measures indicate greater preference for equality we find again that CEE countries are more likely to prefer greater equality (or consider eliminating inequalities) while countries of the former Soviet Union outside the Baltics are less likely to prefer equality (or consider eliminating inequality). The Baltic states are somewhere in between but they generally appear to be closer in their preferences to their CEE counterparts. Thus, our findings on the preferences of CEE relative to the former 17