Explaining Preferences for Social Insurance and Redistribution in a Laboratory Democracy

转移支付在美国各级政府的预算中占很大一部分，而且还在不断增长。其中许多转移支付计划根据人们的收入水平来帮助他们，但转移支付也被用来帮助飓风和龙卷风等自然灾害的受害者，而不考虑收入。关于将税金用于再分配目的的意见可能会因打算解决这两类问题中的哪一类而有所不同。如果再分配的目的是改变收入分配，而不是弥补个人无法控制的力量造成的损失，那么选民对再分配的支持可能会有所不同。研究人员提出了一个议程，旨在更好地了解人们是如何形成对这种再分配税收的偏好的，具体目的是分析这笔钱是用于资助穷人的福利，还是作为应对灾难性事件的社会保险的一种形式。该项目涉及实验室实验，在这些实验中，受试者通过一项涉及真正努力的任务来赚钱，然后就税率进行投票，以筹集资金进行再分配。通过改变再分配的执行方式--即使收益相等或恢复损失--以及发生灾难性事件的概率等其他变量，研究人员将观察投票行为如何随着这些控制而发生变化。受试者将完成问卷和其他任务，以得出他们的总体政治意识形态以及他们对风险的态度，作为对结果的进一步控制。拟议中的研究的主要学术价值在于，它可能有助于理解民主国家支持再分配税收的微观基础。研究人员设计了实验室实验，区分选民在不同选择设置下的偏好；结果将有助于理解偏好、规则、意识形态和支持再分配税收的相互作用。这项拟议的研究对公共政策以及政治学和行为经济学等几个研究和教学领域产生了更广泛的影响。在第一种情况下，这项研究将为面临再分配政策制定的政策制定者提供洞察，了解公民愿意如何、何时以及为什么愿意支持某些类型的再分配政策。该项目将通过让政治学、经济学和相关社会科学的研究生在进行工作的实验室担任研究助理，参与介绍和讨论工作的跨学科研讨会，以及在课堂上对项目中收集的数据进行二次分析，来影响教学。

Transfer payments are a large and growing part of the budgets of all levels of government in the US. Many of these transfer payment programs help people based upon their income level, but transfers are also used to assist victims of natural disasters, such as hurricanes and tornados, regardless of income. Opinions regarding the use of tax money for the purposes of redistribution may differ depending upon which of these two classes of problems it is intended to address. Voter support for redistribution may differ if it is designed to change the earned income distribution as opposed to remedying losses due to forces beyond an individual's control. The researchers propose an agenda intended to provide a better understanding of how people form preferences for such redistributive taxation with a specific intent to analyze any differences between whether the money is used to fund benefits to the poor or as a form of social insurance against catastrophic events. The project involves laboratory experiments in which subjects earn money through a task involving real effort and then vote on a tax rate to raise money for redistribution. By varying how the redistribution is carried out - i.e., to equalize earnings or to restore losses - as well as other variables such as the probability of a catastrophic event, the researchers will observe how voting behavior changes with these controls. Subjects will complete questionnaires and other tasks to elicit their general political ideology as well as their attitudes towards risk as further controls on the results. The principal intellectual merit of the proposed research lies in its potential contribution to understanding the micro-foundations of support for redistributive taxation in a democracy. The investigators design laboratory experiments that distinguish voters' preferences under various choice settings; the results will contribute to understanding the interplay of preferences, rules, ideology, and support of redistributive taxation. The proposed research has broader impacts on public policy and in several fields of research and teaching, such as political science and behavioral economics. In the first case, the research will offer policymakers who are faced with making redistributive policies insight on how, when, and why citizens would be willing to support certain types of redistributive policies. The project will affect teaching by involving graduate students in political science, economics, and allied social sciences through their work as research assistants in the laboratory where the work will be conducted, their participation in cross-disciplinary seminars where the work will be presented and discussed, and in classes where they may conduct secondary analyses of the data that are collected in the project.