The study examines two dimensions of inequality acceptance in Sweden—income differences and welfare chauvinism—as well as their association with populist attitudes. Based on original survey data collected from 2019 to 2022 (three pooled cross-sections, random samples of the adult population), the study reveals substantial social (by class) and political (by partisanship) divides regarding how redistributive ambitious and socially inclusive the welfare state should be, challenging assumptions of strong sociopolitical consensus. Welfare chauvinism is found to be more politically divisive than approval of income differences, with the sharpest divides emerging in the exclusivist conceptions of social rights and welfare deservingness held by voters of the non-mainstream (radical) right-wing party, the Sweden Democrats. The results suggest that conflicts over inclusivist versus exclusivist conceptions of social rights and welfare deservingness could become central in Swedish politics, potentially shifting away from the universalist principles that underpin its social democratic welfare state model.

This edited volume presents the latest findings from the 5th International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) Social Inequality module, a widely recognized dataset comprising responses from over 30 countries. It explores global perspectives on social inequality, including topics such as public views on taxation, government redistribution, personal experiences of inequality, and related themes. The chapters provide valuable insights into how attitudes toward inequality have evolved since they were first studied comparatively in the late 1980s. The chapters in this book demonstrate how international scholars are using these data to shed new light on beliefs about inequality and inspire further research into societal attitudes worldwide.

Many climate change mitigation policies face public opposition, especially when they impose visible costs on households and areperceived as unfairly regressive. This country-comparative study examines specific social policy instruments that may help build public support for increasing fossil fuel taxes in Europe. Using multilevel modeling with data from the European Social Survey and the Social Policy Indicators database, we find that higher levels of means-tested social assistance are positively associated with greater public support for fossil fuel taxes. More specifically, means-tested social assistance appears to promote support by reducing self-experienced economic hardship and lessening value conflicts among individuals with strong eco-social values. Policies that raise the minimum income floor in society thus seem crucial for fostering eco-social synergies and strengthening public support for government-led climate action and decarbonization efforts.

Coinciding with a trend of rising economic divides within many countries, scholarly interest in the subject of inequality has grown significantly in the 21st century. Since its creation in 1987, the Social Inequality module of the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) has evolved into an exceptionally comprehensive country-comparative individual-level database on public beliefs about inequality and socioeconomic conditions. The module stands out among international surveys due to its extensive thematic depth and breadth, along with the long times pan it covers. This provides unique opportunities for charting and monitoring longitudinal trends in social inequality, as well as for conducting comparative analyses aimed at advancing theories that incorporate the national context as an integral part of the explanatory framework. This introduction describes the content, coverage, and history of the fifth wave of the Social Inequality module (2019). This survey wave was conducted in 34 countries and combines previously fielded topics with new ones that speak to current debates in different areas of inequality research. The fifth wave introduces new questions focusing on anger and unfairness, reducing inequality by market actors, government inefficacy, lived experience of inequality, economic insecurity and deprivation, and social trust. This introduction chapter also presents some descriptive findings on these new topics, and offers an outlook on the content of this edited volume, which further explores these themes through a range of studies utilising the ISSP data.

The emerging comparative research field on public attitudes toward education policy has devoted little attention to private education and market governance of education systems. This chapter takes an initial step in filling this void by examining public opinion across 41 countries, primarily using data from the International Social Survey Programme. While the results show that a substantial proportion of people believe that private schools should have a role in the education system, the vast majority in most countries still prefer that the government should be the primary provider of school education. Moreover, we find relatively strong public agreement in most countries that it is unjust for those with higher incomes to purchase better education. However, consistent with policy feedback theory and previous case studies indicating that public education is inadequate and unable to meet the increasing demand for high-quality education in many developing countries, we find that countries characterized by less universal access to education tend to display greater popular support for private education. To gain further insights and draw more general inferences regarding these matters, we conclude that extending comparative studies to lower-income countries of the Global South is an urgent task for future research.

The theoretical proposition that social networks contribute to class divides in political attitudes has rarely been further developed or empirically scrutinized with individual-level data on a large cross-national scale. In this article, we theorize and empirically examine how the class profiles of personal networks may shape individual attitudes to income inequality from a country-comparative perspective. Using multilevel modeling and data from the ISSP Social Networks and Resources module, covering 29 countries, we find that having more family, friends, and acquaintances in upper-middle-class positions is associated with lower support for reducing inequality, while having more social ties to working-class positions is associated with higher support for reducing inequality. We also assess how these relationships differ across countries depending on the institutional context, finding that both own class location and the class profiles of personal networks are more strongly related to attitudes to income inequality in countries with a higher rate of government redistribution. The study provides new theoretical and empirical insights into the importance of personal networks’ class profiles for shaping individual attitudes and structural ideological divisions linked to economic inequality, while also suggesting that social networks are key to understanding institutionally embedded distributive conflicts from a country-comparative perspective.

Decarbonization, environmental protection, and sustainable development are more topical than ever. Despite long-standing debates about the regressive profile of environmental taxes, the welfare state’s role in buffering adverse distributive impacts of climate policy is largely unexplored. We examine if social policy shields households from falling into poverty due to environmental taxes tied to consumption. We specifically focus on the importance of income replacement in social insurance and social assistance. To enable detailed assessments of the distributive outcomes of environmental policy, we impute environmental taxes into the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC). Our comparative analysis of 26 European countries indicates that the welfare state protects households from relative income poverty due to environmental taxes. Moreover, comparisons between educational groups suggest that both social insurance and social assistance play different yet complementary roles in reducing socio-economic gradients in poverty related to environmental taxes.

Based on a cross-disciplinary theoretical framework, this study investigates the relation­ships between multiple components of socioeconomic status (income, occupation, and ed­ucation), basic need fulfillment (autonomy, competence, relatedness, security, and respect), and subjective well-being (life satisfaction and emotional well-being). Using high-quality Swedish survey data, we applied Confirmatory Factor Analysis and Structural Equation Modeling. To address potential mood bias, we measured socioeconomic status, need ful­fillment, and subjective well-being at different time points, reflecting the theorized sequen­tial order of these constructs. Empirically, household income stood out as the strongest socioeconomic predictor of both need fulfillment and subjective well-being. However, higher occupational status was also positively associated with multiple types of need ful­fillment and with greater subjective well-being. Educational level, by comparison, was linked only to greater fulfillment of competence in multivariate analyses. All five needs were positively associated with subjective well-being in bivariate analyses; however, only the fulfillment of autonomy and security remained significant predictors and mediators of the relationship between socioeconomic status and subjective well-being in structural equation models. The findings underscore the substantial influence of income, the addi­tional benefits of occupational status, and the importance of autonomy and security needs in understanding subjective well-being and its socioeconomic gradient.

This short note introduces the second special issue focusing on the analysis of comparative data from the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) Social Inequality (SI) module. In addition to expressing our appreciation for our colleagues on the drafting group for sharing their time and expertise to shape the content of the 2019 module, we provide a summary of the three empirical articles featured in this second special issue. These articles represent a further contribution to our understanding of inequality beliefs more than three decades since the first ISSP SI module was fielded in the late 1980s. In conclusion, we encourage the global research community to make extensive use of the 2019 ISSP SI module data to further explore the dynamics of inequality beliefs and socioeconomic conditions worldwide.