with ideology, their degree of self-interest, and other personal characteristics, their demand for redistribution.

To the extent that we are unable to completely observe ideology and self-interest, part of the correlation between these variables and demand for redistribution or equality perceptions will be captured by the error term. In other words, e1i and e2i will be correlated. Similarly, we expect that the e1i might be correlated with equality perceptions, generating issues of classical endogeneity.

# 3 Data description

The Social Inequality surveys of the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) are the main data source for this paper. We use all available waves covering the years 1987, 1992, 1999, and 2009. The initial sample of 9 countries (1987) was expanded in each wave to reach 26 countries in 2009. The samples are representative at the country level, with sample sizes per country and year varying between 1,000 and 2,000. These surveys include almost all the information needed to estimate the model described above. They include the two dependent variables: perceptions of inequality and demand for redistribution, as well as information on voting or political preferences to construct the ideology variable and information on income and education used to account for self-interest. Finally, they record a host of individual socio-economic characteristics – employment, gender, age, location of residence – to act as additional controls. A mix of other data sets, described in detail below, are used as sources for the objective levels of inequality, poverty, unemployment, government expenditures, which together represent the economic context variable.

In 1992, 1999, and 2009, the ISSP surveys asked individuals to choose among five different pictures the one that best described the _type_ of society of the country in which they live. More in detail, the specific question and possible multiple-choice answers are shown below in figure 1.

The diagrams and the short descriptions below each of them implies a ranking from the most unequal society, depicted by the ‘Type A’ diagram to the most equal, ‘Type D’, society. Some may argue that the diagrams and captions reflect more directly the polarization of a society rather than its degree of inequality. Society ‘A’ is polarized, while society ‘D’, with its large middle class, is the least polarized. However, the same ranking holds in terms of inequality. As shown by Gimpelson and Treisman (2018), by assuming that the area of the small rectangles composing these ‘pyramids’ represents the size of the population group within a specific income class, it is possible to calculate the actual Gini index for each of the five types of societies represented in Figure 1. Indeed, type A has the highest Gini, with a value of 42, type B has a value of 35, type C of 30 and the most equal is type A with a Gini of 20. Since the ranking in terms of polarization and inequality are the same, it is safe to assume that individuals perceiving high inequality (or high polarization) in their countries would choose Type A, while those believing that their countries are quite equal (or not polarized) would choose Type D. The empirical analysis which we will 9