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Open Access Publications from the University of California

Scholarly Works (2 results)

  • Thesis
  • Peer Reviewed
UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations (2014)

This dissertation considers how income inequality affects attitudes towards tax policies and income redistribution. In the first paper, I adopt traditional models of the relationship between income inequality and policy preferences to incorporate income volatility. I find that greater income volatility can lead voters to prefer less progressive taxes depending on the distribution of the income shocks. Because income volatility and inequality are positively correlated, with each potentially having an opposite effect on public opinion, my model predicts that support for increasing taxes on upper incomes may not rise in the face of growing income inequality. In the second paper, I estimate the casual effect of short term, temporary changes in household income on individuals' tax progressivity preferences through a series survey experiments. I find evidence that volatility does in fact diminish preferences for tax progressivity. Respondents preferred significantly less progressive taxes when described households that had more volatile incomes regardless of the pattern of volatility over time. For the third and final paper, I develop a new, more powerful permutation procedure for analyzing two-way factorial experiments. The method is a non-parametric alternative to traditional analysis of variance (ANOVA). In Monte Carlo simulations, the procedure was better able to disentangle main factor and interaction effects than regression-based ANOVA tests, particularly when the design was imbalanced. I developed the procedure for use in the analysis of the income volatility experiments.

    Cover page: Tax Preference on the Income Roller Coaster: How Income Volatility Changes the Relationship Between Income Inequality and Preference for Redistribution
    • Article
    • Peer Reviewed
    UC Davis Previously Published Works (2021)
    During the 2016 election, Donald Trump castigated unauthorized immigrants as “murderers and rapists.” During his presidency, he continued the use of this rhetoric, explicitly linking unauthorized migrants to threatening narratives. Here, we consider three questions: Did Donald Trump and his immigration positions serve as an “anxiety trigger” for Latina/os? Are individuals with contextually stigmatized attributes especially sensitive to Trump and his policy proposals? Is Spanish language itself, an attribute negatively stigmatized in the context of the immigration issue, sufficient to increase deportation anxiety? Utilizing survey experiments of Latina/os, we demonstrate that exposure to a Trump immigration cue is sufficient to increase anxiety about deportation. We also demonstrate that stigmatized attributes predict anxiety, but do not moderate the effect of the Trump cue. Lastly, we provide evidence that survey language affects anxiety among Latina/os. In Studies 1 (n = 736) and 2 (n = 1,040), we show that exposure to information about Trump’s immigration agenda significantly increases reports about deportation anxiety. In Study 3 (n = 1,734), we show that the Trump exposure condition induces heightened anxiety but that Latina/o attributes (language proficiency and use, immigration status, assessed phenotype) and identity strength have an independent effect on deportation anxiety. In Study 4 (n = 775), we randomized bilingual respondents into Spanish or English language survey protocols and found that comparable bilinguals exposed to Spanish language report higher levels of anxiety compared to English-language survey takers.
      Cover page: Trump-induced anxiety among Latina/os
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