The Impact of Social Mobility and Within-Family Learning on Voter Preferences: Evidence from a Sample of Twins

Abstract

Income-maximizing consumers should vote in predictable ways: support for liberal, redistributive governments should fall as income rises. But weak empirical evidence for these voting patterns might suggest that voters are influenced by alternative factors, such as perceptions of social mobility from within-family learning. To examine these effects, this paper uses a data set of twins and a recently-developed econometric approach to show that within-family learning and family-specific effects are important determinants of voting preferences and preferences for redistribution.

JEL Classification: D31, D63, H20, C10