Does Distributive Inequality Cause Relational Inequality? Evidence from a Survey Experiment
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Contemporary egalitarian theory has been shaped by a debate between distributive and relational perspectives. Relational egalitarians argue that equality is primarily about the character of our social and political relationships, rather than the pattern of distribution of goods. But they often also claim that distributive and relational ideals are connected in practice, because material inequality impairs our ability to stand as social and political equals. Using a survey experiment, we assess the impact of material inequality on relational equality. We show that priming income inequality increases perceptions of unequal social status; but it does not affect perceived equal political standing, or the extent to which respondents affirm the ideal of relational equality. We argue that this empirical approach yields deeper payoffs for conceptual and normative questions about relational equality; and it contributes to wider methodological debates about the role of survey data in normative political theory.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.022 | 0.161 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".