The cultural assimilation of individualism and preferences for redistribution

The project analyzes the relationship between individualism and preferences for redistribution, using variation in immigrants’ countries of origin to capture the impact of cultural values and beliefs on personal attitudes towards income redistribution and equality.

Using global individual-level survey data for almost one million individuals (including 65,000 migrants) in a large number of countries around the world, the researcher finds strong support for the hypothesis that more individualistic cultures are associated with lower preferences for redistribution.

At the same time, cultural assimilation in this dimension seems to take place relatively fast, where the impact of the destination culture starts to dominate the origin culture when an individual has lived as long in the country of destination as she did in her country of origin.

Moreover, the researcher finds no statistically significant effect of the origin culture on an individual’s preferences for redistribution if migration took place before the age of 10. The results are confirmed using a variety of robustness checks, including the grammatical rule of a pronoun drop as an instrumental variable.