Replication Data for Income Perception, Information, and Progressive Taxation: Evidence from a Survey Experiment

Are individuals accurately informed about their place in the income distribution? Despite the importance of accurate information about one’s placement in the income distribution for many models of redistribution, this assumption remains untested. We present survey data and an embedded experiment where we inform some individuals their true place in the income distribution. We find that individuals have considerable error regarding their self-placement in the income distribution, and that revealing to individuals their true placement affects preferences for tax progressivity, but mainly for poor individuals and for individuals who learn that they are poorer than they thought. These results have implications for information assumptions of redistribution models of comparative political economy, extant models of citizen information and redistribution preferences, and demonstrate the importance of studying views towards tax progressivity preferences, an understudied dimension of redistribution preferences.