Who wants to share? Analyzing perceptions of horizontal inequalities and redistribution attitudes in India and South Africa

Despite the widespread recognition of the relationship between inequalities between ethnic, religious and racial groups or so-called ‘horizontal inequalities’ (HIs) and political stability in multi-cultural societies, extremely little research has been conducted on three important and closely related dimensions of this concept and phenomenon: 1) the relationship between objective and perceived socio-economic HIs, 2) people’s general attitudes towards redistributive policies aimed at correcting existing socio-economic HIs or what we refer to in this proposal as ‘horizontal redistribution’, and 3) people’s actual behavioral responses to different kind of redistributive interventions. The proposed project addresses these three important –yet neglected- dimensions of HIs by systematically investigating and analyzing the determinants of people’s perceptions of socio-economic HIs as well as their general attitudes and actual behavioral responses to horizontal redistribution in India and South Africa; i.e. two countries that have been confronted with very sharp socio-economic HIs for a long time.

Keywords:Horizontal Inequalities, Perceived versus objective inequalities, Horizontal redistribution, Perceptions surveys, Inter-group relations, India, South Africa, Survey and behavorial experiments

Disciplines:Social differentiation, stratification and social mobility, Political inequality, Race and ethnic relations, Group and interpersonal relations, Development studies