Intergenerational transmission of preferences for redistribution: An investigation among second-generation immigrants in the United States

The demand for redistribution varies at a large scale across countries as individuals have defined preferences over redistribution. For instance, American citizens tend to exhibit weak preferences for redistribution unlike European individuals who seem to favor redistribution (Alesina and Glaeser, 2004). Those differences across countries originate from the fact that individual preferences for redistribution are influenced by cultural components - beliefs, norms and values, which are transmitted from parents or society at large to children. Given that culture determines one's preferences for redistribution and that parents transmit their culture, the question that poses itself is: "do parents transmit their preferences for redistribution to their children?" To examine the intergenerational transmission of attitudes towards redistribution, we focus on children-of-immigrants' redistributive preferences in the United States and associate their parents' preferences to the mean preference in their birth country. Using cross-sectional data from the General Social Survey, the results indicate that second-generation immigrants' preferences for redistribution are not influenced by the average preference in their country of origin, suggesting that immigrant parents tend to not transmit their preferred level of redistribution to their offspring.