tend to agree with this statement. A higher value of this variable is interpreted as stronger demand for government redistribution. Information on demand for redistribution is available for more countries and years than equality perceptions. However, we only use those country-years for which equality perceptions is also available.

In order to have some quantitative measure of ideology, we choose two different variables. The first of them, available only for a subset of respondents, corresponds to the political placement in a leftright axis. This variable is obtained from a direct question to interviewees on their position in that axis or inferred from their affiliation or sympathy to a political party. Out of our sample of 46,894 individuals, 30% have missing information on political ideology and 13% express no ideology; thus, we have valid information of the political ideology for 57% of our sample – around 26,800 individuals. To overcome this sample limitation, we also look at an additional variable that we take, as robustness check, to be a proxy for political ideology. This question derives from Question 12 of the Social Inequality module of ISSP which is available for almost all the sample. Question 12 asks respondents to give their opinion on the importance of several factors in determining how much people ought to earn for a job. We focus on one factor: what individuals need to support their family. We argue that this variable correlates with ideology: rewarding individuals taking into account their needs seems related to social justice.

In terms of the economic context, the paper uses data from different sources: (i) Gini indices on per capita household income mainly drawn from the Luxembourg Income Study Database (LIS) and, when not available, from “All the Ginis” data set of Milanovic (2018) (ii) data on unemployment rate and government expenditures are taken either from Eurostat (1999 and 2009), from the Milanovic's Household Expenditure and Income Dataset for Transition Economies (HEIDE) data (1992), or from the World Development Indicators. Finally, (iii), poverty is defined as the percentage of people living below $10 a day in 2005 PPP. The variable is calculated on income data using PovCalNet and the World Development Indicators data set.

As part of the contextual variables we also include a measure of the intergenerational elasticity of education from Narayan and Van der Weide (2018). This measure is intended to proxy for the level of _fairness_ in the society. The higher the elasticity, the larger is the correlation between parent and children’s education, implying a lower degree of educational mobility and, thus, a less fair process of income generation. The elasticity is estimated for each 10-year birth cohort from the 1930s to the 1980s in each country. We use three versions of this elasticity. The first one is a country-year variable, which is the population-weighted average of the elasticity of the cohorts which are 20 to 39 years old in each given country and year. The second and third versions are country-cohort specific: the first version varies across countries and birth cohorts but not across years and the second is estimated separately for each gender. These variables are only available for the subset of individuals born in 1930 or after.

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