hypothesis. Wong (2004) goes a step further. Using the 1990 wave of the _World Values Survey_ , Wong reports significant variation among post-socialist countries with some countries found to be more supportive of redistribution, but others no different and still others _less_ supportive than the United States, thereby calling into question the existence of a socialist legacy _en bloc_ . In the most recent installment of this literature, Chong and Gradstein (2006) compare support for public spending in Finland with that in the Baltic republics and find that along selected dimensions, the Baltic states appear no different from Finland.

# **3 The World Values Survey and attitudes to equality**

This paper probes attitudes to inequality using micro-data from successive waves of the _World Value Surveys_ (WVS). As with other attitudinal surveys, these surveys are designed to enable cross-country comparisons of values and attitudes on a broad range of issues.<sup>4</sup> For our purposes one of the important features of these surveys is that they cover a wide range of post-socialist countries from both Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. As the survey has been fielded in four waves since the early 1980s, the data allow us to examine trends in attitudes to equality over time.

We focus in this paper on the three waves conducted since the fall of the Berlin wall: 1999-2001, 1995-97, and 1990.<sup>5</sup> The 1999-2001 wave includes 23 countries from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union out of a total of 78, the 1995-97 survey 18 out of a total of 49, and the 1990 survey 12 out of a total of 42. However, as data on a few key independent variables such as educational attainment of individuals surveyed are not available for a number of countries, the sample of countries covered by the regression analysis in the next section is smaller. In particular, we have samples of 17, 15, and 4 countries from Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union from the 1999-2001, 1995-1997, and 1990 waves, respectively (see Appendix Table 1). Country coverage varies from wave to wave. Because the 1999-2001 wave covers the greatest number of post-socialist economies, we focus first on this wave.

Preferences for equality may be gauged from more than one question in the WVS. The most relevant question for our purposes is one in which respondents are asked to rank their views on a ten-digit scale where 1 stands for “Incomes should be made more equal” and 10 for “Incomes differences should be larger to provide incentives for individual effort.” It is also the survey question with the most number of responses and covers the most number of countries. The interpretation of this indicator requires caution: **lower values of this measure indicate greater preference for equality.**<sup>**6**</sup> There is a huge variation in response to this question both within and across countries. In Figure 1 we plot mean response by country against GDP per capita for the

> 4 The surveys are conducted by the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) based at the University of Michigan.  A detailed description of the survey method and instrument may be found in Inglehart et. al. (2004).

> 5 Data from the most recent wave 2005-2007 are not available at this time.

> 6 Other questions are discussed in the final section of the paper.

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