Wann wollen Personen progressivere Steuersysteme? Obwohl in mehreren europäischen Ländern die Ungleichheit in den letzten Jahrzehnten zugenommen hat, stagniert die öffentliche Nachfrage nach progressiven Steuern. In dieser Dissertation argumentiere ich, dass Steuerpräferenzen meist keine auf breiter Informationsbasis beruhenden kognitiven Kosten-Nutzen Erwägungen darstellen, sondern Menschen dazu neigen, auf Gerechtigkeitsheuristiken zurückzugreifen, die stark von individuellen Wahrnehmungen des eigenen institutionellen -und sozialen Umfelds beeinflusst sind. Die Dissertation leitet aus von dieser theoretischen Überlegung konkrete Hypothesen ab und testet diese mit Daten aus dem European Social Survey und experimentellen Web-Umfragen in Österreich.

When do people want more redistributive taxes? Although several countries in Europe have experienced rising levels of inequality in the last couple of decades, public demands for redistributive taxes have remained at similar levels or even decreased. In this dissertation, I argue that we can understand this phenomenon by acknowledging the role of limited public information about inequality and tax rates and the importance of fairness heuristics in hindering or enabling individuals to demand redistribution by taxes. Utilizing data from the European Social Survey and experimental web surveys conducted in Austria, this dissertation empirically tests these theoretical arguments. First, I show that people tend to use the status quo redistribution as a baseline for fairness judgments and provide cross-country and micro-level experimental evidence that people’s tax rates they consider fair strongly depend on people’s perceptions about the status quo taxation. Second, I suggest that individuals’ perceptions about the state of inequality and redistribution are not only indicators of people’s (mis)information but also the product of social comparisons and reflect not only how they see the world but also how they want to see the world. Focusing on the direction of comparison, I theoretically argue and empirically show that the choice of upward- or downward-oriented comparisons systematically biases respondents’ perceived relative income positions and their fairness attitudes because people use the way inequality is described as a clue to what individuals should have. Analyzing individuals’ perceptions about their own and other’s tax contributions, I show that motivational biases lead the rich to perceive higher levels of tax progressivity than the poor, and vice versa, which explains the large amount of tax preference polarization found in previous studies. Correcting these misperceptions causally affects individuals’ expressed support for redistributive taxation and can increase tax solidarity among the rich. In sum, the dissertation provides strong evidence that individuals’ fairness attitudes are endogenous to the institutional setting and suggests that this stabilizes individuals’ attitudes toward progressive taxation in the long term and may explain why individuals do not increase their support for redistributive taxation in times of rising inequality.