Spring School on perceptions of wealth (inequality)

Date: March 17 – March 28, 2025

Venue: University of Bamberg, Markusplatz 3, Bamberg, Germany

Organizers:
Daniel Mayerhoffer, University of Amsterdam

Jan Schulz-Gebhard, University of Bamberg

Daria Tisch, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies (MPIfG)

Hannah Olbrich, University of Bamberg

Keynote speakers:

Luna Bellani, University of Ulm

Fabian Pfeffer, LMU Munich

Info:

We are pleased to announce the Spring School on Perceptions of Wealth Inequality, funded by the Volkswagen Foundation. This interdisciplinary research incubator aims to explore perceptions of wealth inequality from different perspectives. The Spring School will bring together young scholars and established experts from diverse fields such as political and communication science, economics, history, and sociology.

Why Perceptions of Wealth Inequality? Across different social groups and countries, individuals often perceive the distribution of wealth wrong. This applies to estimating their view of their own wealth relative to the society they live in but also to the overall situation in this society, i.e., the level of economic inequality, and its consequences for individual life courses. Such misperceptions and more generally perceptions of wealth have far-reaching consequences, as it is the perceived inequality, rather than the actual inequality, that may shape redistributive preferences and, consequently, one’s stance on policy measures. Through deliberation and decision making these stances, in turn, will impact policy making, institutional organisation, and hence the actual inequality as well as its perceptions.

Key Objectives

1. Skill Development: Participants will gain valuable skills through project-based learning and collaboration with experts.
2. Trans-Disciplinary Networking and Collaboration: The school builds bridges across diverse fields, such as political and communication science, economics, history, and sociology, fostering dialogue and cross-fertilisation between these traditionally parallel disciplines. Furthermore, the school features dedicated exchange with public stakeholders to kick-start policy-oriented thinking.
3. Research Output: Findings of successful projects will be published in a special issue in the journal Historical Social Research.
4. Inform the Public Discourse: Executive summaries will be shared on the established platform ungleichheit.info.

The School as a Research Incubator

The school will not focus on traditional teaching elements such as lectures or seminars/tutorials. Instead, the two weeks in Bamberg will mostly comprise intense project work: There will be seven projects led by senior experts, which examine different aspects of inequality perceptions using various methods specifically fit for their respective research puzzles. Each participant will join one of these projects. Together, the project teams will work on their project throughout the school, making serious progress towards a publishable research paper. Along the way, participants will learn (more deeply) about the methods they use and the specific topic they study.

The Projects

(Self-)perceptions of the global business elite

Diliara Valeeva, Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research and Data Science Centre, University of Amsterdam

This project will investigate the self-perceptions of the rich and their conscious or subconscious impact on business and policy making. The research understands these as emerging from interactions of wealthy people with their peers, namely at corporate board meetings. It will construct and analyse networks of people cooperating on corporate boards, analyse co-occurrence and differences in corporate policy in cross-section and longitudinally, and characterise individual board members. To operationalise this mixed-method approach, the expert will prepare data (sources) based on their previous experience with similar studies.

Attitudes towards wealth inequality and redistribution

Nhat An Trinh, Institute for New Economic Thinking, Department of Social Policy and Intervention and Nuffield College, University of Oxford

This project focuses on how citizens perceive (i) the distribution of wealth within society and (ii) the role of the state and family in affecting this distribution. Despite extensive research on redistributive preferences, the nexus between perceptions of wealth inequality and preferences for its (re-) distribution is not systematically understood. On the one hand, perceptions of wealth inequality may drive support for the state to redistribute wealth across households by means of taxation. On the other hand, these perceptions may affect attitudes towards wealth transfers made within families through financial gifts and inheritances. Since how far perceptions of wealth inequality influence redistributive preferences is grounded in historical, contextual, and cultural factors (e.g. property regimes, inheritance customs, meritocratic beliefs, opportunities for upward mobility), this project examines granular data on the regional level on attitudes, perceptions, fairness evaluations and voting behaviour from survey and experimental sources and how these are linked to perceptions of wealth inequality. By doing so, this project contributes to a better understanding of the so-called “paradox of redistribution”, i.e., why rising pre-tax inequality rarely translates into increased redistribution. The expert leading the group is building on her extensive experience with regional data in this context.

Media representations of German immigrants in the U.S.

Liane Rothenberger, Department for Communication Science, KU Eichstätt-Ingolstadt & Kevin Grieves, Communication Studies Department, Whitworth University Spokane

This project investigates how American newspapers covered immigration of German citizens into the US. Our focus will be on immigrant groups that came to the United States during the 19th century, above all after the European revolutions of 1848-1849. How did the immigrants, many of them arriving in poverty, come to wealth? How were their efforts perceived by the wider public? Together, we will content analyze historical newspaper articles and qualitatively examine coverage narratives and framing. We will evaluate if, and if yes, to which extent, wealth might be connected to perceptions of education, religion, morality and diligence. This project will contribute valuable historical context to our understanding of contemporary journalistic discourses surrounding perceptions of wealth related to immigrant groups.

Agent-based simulation of perceptions of wealth

Jan Lorenz, Social Data Science, Constructor University Bremen

The paper aims to formalise some of the empirical channels behind misperceptions using computer simulations. Recent work demonstrates that endogenously evolving reference groups emerging e.g. from residential segregation based on class can be important drivers of misperceptions. Yet, these explanatory attempts are purely static and could be extended by adding a purposive element allowing agents to adapt their perceptions in light of new information. The foundational bounded confidence model can be used to study the dynamic effects of opinion adaptation with initial misperceptions. The framework is sufficiently flexible to include both local biases based on individual social networks that differentially affect agents and global signals based, e.g. on media coverage that are both well documented in the extant literature. The group working on simulations will apply this so-called bounded-confidence framework to examine which types of perception biases lead to which outcomes, i.e., a state of consensus, persistent fluctuations or stable opinion polarisation. In this way, the simulations can also generate novel hypotheses on the relationship between types of misperceptions, opinion adaptation and long-term outcomes that might be fruitfully applied to more empirically oriented studies.

Public debates and statistical wealth surveys in the long 20th century in Germany

Eva Gajek, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, Cologne

The project investigates the connection between statistical surveys of wealth and their scientific and public discussions in the long 20th century in Germany. How and when were numerical surveys of wealth problematized, when did they lead to scandals and how and when did a broad public use figures to communicate about its social structure? The project focuses on three time periods: from the turn of the century to 1914, from the 1960s/to 1970s and from 2001-2010. All three periods were characterized by a strong public discussion about wealth inequality after statistical figures were published and provoked a broad, but also scientific debate that problematized or scandalized the published figures. The empirical basis of the project is a wide range of source material such as statistical surveys, media texts, but also scientific studies.

Wealth Perceptions and Preferences for Taxation and Environmental Policies

Franziska Disslbacher, Research Institute Economics of Inequality and the Department Socioeconomics at WU, Vienna University of Economics and Business

Wealth manifests not only in its levels but also in its origins and uses. Wealth, resulting from savings and intergenerational transfers, serves various purposes, from savings for a rainy day at the bottom to the exercise of power at the top of the distribution. Notably, research has shown that perceptions of economic positions and inequality, rather than actual economic status, significantly influence attitudes and behaviors. Building on this, our project aims to explore how subjective relative wealth, together with beliefs about the individual origin and use of wealth, affects preferences for redistribution, focusing on taxation and climate policies. To gather relevant data, we will design and conduct a representative survey, including an experimental component. Understanding perceived wealth is crucial for unraveling the mechanisms behind the legitimization of wealth and its distribution, and the interaction between the acceptance of specific redistributive and environmental policies.

Perceptions of Wealth Inequality Survey

Laila Schmitt, LMU Munich

The perception of wealth distribution - how exactly people perceive actual wealth at the lower and upper ends of the wealth distribution - is complex. This complexity arises from the multifaceted nature of wealth, which includes assets, savings and debt, and the difficulty of directly observing these dimensions, as is the case with perceptions of income distribution based on earnings for occupations. This study attempts to measure the perceptions of wealth inequality by asking a nationally representative online survey to estimate the average assets, savings and debt required to belong to certain wealth percentiles. To understand the determinants of these perceptions, we will also collect data on beliefs about the methods of wealth acquisition.

No participation fee, accommodation provided!

Accommodation (one-bed rooms) and meals (three/day) will be provided during the school free of charge to all participants. Participants must pay for their own travel costs. We have limited funding to support participants who can otherwise not get their travel expenses reimbursed. For sustainability reasons, we will not cover flights.

Findings of successful projects will be published in a special issue in the journal Historical Social Research. For this special issue we alo have an open call for papers

Contact: SPINE@posteo.de

The Spring School on perceptions of wealth inequality (SPINE) is funded by the Volkswagen Foundation.