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Despite recent empirical evidence on the importance of perceived inequality, its analysis is still underexplored. In this paper we study whether unobserved perceptions of inequality are reflected in observed individual opinions in a consistent fashion. Inconsistency is relevant to ealuate the level of agreement that individuals share with respect to different domains of inequality. Using the wave from the 2009 International Social Survey Program in the US, we show that inequality is a complicated concept prone to inconsistencies and propose a testing procedure to an empirical appraisal. We find that inconsistencies exist though they may not extend to all the domains of inequality. This inconsistency also emerges by analyzing the relation between unobserved perceptions and political treatment suggesting the hypothesis that inconsistency may be associated with a set of relevant political preferences. more...

This paper analyses the role of peaceful and violent protest in the democratization process. We interpret the democratization process as a sequence of phases so as to allow citizens' and elites' preferences for democracy to vary according to the particular phase that a country is experiencing. By doing so we jointly model the probability of protest and of moving through different phases of democracy taking into account time-constant and time-varying unobserved heterogeneity. In particular, we develop a multivariate finite mixture model that introduces a latent variable to capture unobservable factors. On a sample of 171 countries from 1971 to 2010, we provide evidence that protest matters in all phases of democratization, especially peaceful citizens’ demonstrations. On the contrary, violent protest has ambiguous consequences, as it favours initial democratic transitions but at the cost of threatening democratic consolidation. We also find that, after conditioning for economic and institutional controls, there is evidence of time-varying unobserved heterogeneity. more...

A substantial literature finds that freedom in the sense of an expanded opportunity set is positively related to happiness. A contrasting literature, however, finds that an excess of choice can have socially undesirable outcomes. We test the effect of two types of freedom—autonomy and political—on happiness using five waves of World Values Survey data (1981–2008). We find evidence supporting the claim that equipping people with the tools to direct the course of their lives (i.e. increasing autonomy freedom) incentivizes the desire to investigate alternatives (e.g. political parties) before making a decision. The effect of freedoms on happiness is diminished in contexts where individuals have less experience with evaluating alternatives, such as in authoritarian or transitional countries. more...

In the measurement of autonomy freedom, the admissible potential preference relations are elicited by means of the concept of ‘reasonableness’. In this paper we argue for an alternative criterion based on information about the decision maker’s ‘awareness’ of his available opportunities. We argue that such an inter- pretation of autonomy fares better than that based on reasonableness. We then introduce some axioms that capture this intuition and study their logical impli- cations. In the process, a new measure of autonomy freedom is characterized, which generalizes some of the measures so far constructed in the literature. more...

Power is commonly defined as the control exercised by one or more persons over the choices, behaviours and attitudes of another or others. In this paper we focus on a different form of control, i.e., the control that a person exercises on her own choices, behaviours and attitudes. We conceptualize this different form of control by using the Millian idea of autonomy freedom. We argue that the power required for an individual to be in control of her own actions is exercised through her level of autonomy freedom. Autonomy freedom is, therefore, instrumental for an individual to have self-control over her own life. We claim that the extent of autonomy freedom significantly affects an individual's attitudes toward income inequality. More specifically, we point out, and empirically demonstrate, that individuals who enjoy high levels of autonomy freedom value income differences more than those whose degree of autonomy freedom is low © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg. more...