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Four decades of rising incomes at the top, combined with income stagnation and declining intergenerational social mobility for the majority of American households, have combined to produce what has been widely described as a "new gilded age" in the United States. Yet analyses of the best available survey data reveal little evidence of a proportional increase in policy demands for redistribution over time. What explains this puzzling pattern of non-responsiveness? One classical explanation, revived in recent economic literature, postulates that high and persisting levels of optimism about the chances for advancement and social mobility reduce Americans' willingness to support redistributive public policies. Although seemingly paradoxical in the current economic environment, the "prospect of upward mobility" (POUM) hypothesis is consistent with cross-national survey evidence revealing relatively high levels of support for such beliefs. What about trends over-time? This raises an important and largely unexamined question: Have underlying beliefs about POUM also shaped Americans' attitudes toward redistributive policies during the era of rising inequality? In this paper, we examine the POUM-policy preference link, and how it has changed in recent decades. We find that POUM beliefs have shaped how individuals form policy attitudes toward inequality and taxes, net of partisanship, income, and confidence in government. Study findings provide new and provocative evidence in support of the POUM hypothesis, and we discuss implications for models of inequality attitudes and more generally scholarship on the politics of rising inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Access to food is one of the most basic human needs, yet undernourishment remains one of the greatest barriers to health and development in the Global South. The entitlement approach to hunger maintains that the real issue is not the overall availability of food, but access to it. This paper specifically highlights the access failures of women by focusing on how gender-based stratification limits command over food, even in light of existing food supply. Going beyond traditionally used indicators of gender inequality, we examine how women’s legal rights affect the depth of hunger in developing countries. In a first-time longitudinal study of its kind, we use the 50 Years of Women’s Legal Rights historical dataset from the World Bank to measure changes in women’s property rights and constitutional rights from 1990 to 2010. A two-way fixed effects regression analysis of 42 low- and middle-income nations demonstrates that improving women’s rights is associated with lower levels of hunger over time, even controlling for the food supply, economic development, and other relevant variables. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]