Inequality, information, and income tax policy preferences in Austria and Germany
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Inequality has increased over recent decades in many advanced industrial democracies, but taxes have rarely become more progressive. One possible explanation for the lack of a policy response is that, despite rising inequality, voters support higher taxes on incomes weakly, if at all. Using original representative surveys in Austria and Germany, we elicit voters’ preferences over the progressivity of income tax policy and examine whether exposing them to accurate information about inequality affects those preferences. Voters, we find first, express an abstract preference for progressivity but concretely support tax plans that are only somewhat more progressive than the status quo in Austria and less progressive than the status quo in Germany. Second, we find evidence that certain kinds of information about inequality moderately increase progressive tax preferences in Germany; however, we find no equivalent effects in Austria. While information on inequality does seem able to affect tax policy views in certain contexts, it seems unlikely that lack of this information can fully account for the lack of rising redistribution through the income tax system in the face of increasing inequality.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.015 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it