In an era of rising inequality, the U.S. public’s relatively modest support for redistributive policies has been a puzzle for scholars. Deepening the paradox is recent evidence that presenting information about inequality increases subjects’ support for redistributive policies by only a small amount. What explains inequality information’s limited effects? We extend partisan motivated reasoning scholarship to investigate whether political party identification confounds individuals’ processing of inequality information. Our study considers a much larger number of redistribution preference measures (12) than past scholarship. We offer a second novelty by bringing the dimension of historical time into hypothesis testing. Analyzing high-quality data from four American National Election Studies surveys, we find new evidence that partisanship confounds the interrelationship of inequality information and redistribution preferences. Further, our analyses find the effects of partisanship on redistribution preferences grew in magnitude from 2004 through 2016. We discuss implications for scholarship on information, motivated reasoning, and attitudes towards redistribution.

中文翻译：

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美国的再分配偏好、不平等信息和党派动机推理

在不平等加剧的时代，美国公众对再分配政策相对温和的支持一直是学者们的一个难题。加深这一悖论的是最近的证据表明，提供有关不平等的信息只会少量增加受试者对再分配政策的支持。什么解释了不平等信息的有限影响？我们扩展了党派动机推理奖学金来调查政党认同是否混淆了个人对不平等信息的处理。我们的研究考虑了比过去的奖学金更多的再分配偏好措施（12）。我们通过将历史时间的维度引入假设检验来提供第二个新颖性。分析来自四项美国全国选举研究调查的高质量数据，我们发现新的证据表明党派偏见混淆了不平等信息和再分配偏好之间的相互关系。此外，我们的分析发现，从 2004 年到 2016 年，党派偏见对再分配偏好的影响越来越大。我们讨论了对信息、动机推理和对再分配态度的学术影响。