Inequality of Opportunity and Support for Democracy: Evidence from Transition Countries

The linkage between income inequality and citizens' support for democracy has widely been discussed in the literature (e.g. Acemoglu and Robinson, 2001; Andersen, 2012). However, inequality can further be decomposed into two components drawing on the theory of inequality of opportunity (IOp) proposed by Roemer (1998). Inequality that can be traced back to differences in effort is generally perceived as "fair", while inequality due to differences in circumstances (e.g. unequal starting conditions) is regarded as "unfair". Employing the IOp framework, this thesis provides evidence that citizens care about underlying sources of inequality when forming their attitude towards democracy. Using multiple state-of-the-art estimation methods, comparable IOp measures for 27 former communist countries ("transition countries") and 3 Western democracies are calculated. Incorporating these IOp measures into the individual-level attitude formation process conjectured by Krieckhaus et al. (2013) and accounting for the existing level of democracy reveals that higher levels of IOp correspond to higher levels of support for the concept of democracy while overall income inequality has no statistically significant effect. This observation can be rationalized by citizens regarding democracy as a means to achieve equality of opportunity rather than simply as a vehicle for redistribution.