Mapping The Redistributive Debates In Norway And The United States

Debates over inequality and redistribution are central to contemporary politics, yet we know little about how pro-redistributive arguments are framed and how they resonate with citizens. A new study sheds new light on the content, emotional tone, and political role of these arguments across countries.

In this paper, Morten Nyborg Støstad, Max Lobeck, and Chloé de Meulenaer study pro-redistributive arguments in legislative debates in the U.S. Congress and the Norwegian Storting from 2015 to 2022, using large language models to classify speeches, and combine this analysis with large-scale survey experiments on how citizens evaluate different types of arguments.

KEY FINDINGS

• Pro-redistributive arguments are commonly expressed in two distinct ways: fairness-based arguments, which appeal to justice and moral deservingness, and inequality externality arguments, which stress the broader societal consequences of inequality. Fairness arguments are significantly more emotional, especially expressing anger and compassion, while externality arguments are more analytical and more likely to cite empirical evidence and logical reasoning.
• In the U.S. Congress, pro-redistributive debates overwhelmingly emphasize fairness, whereas in Norway, externality arguments are two to five times more prevalent and form a central part of the debate.
• Survey experiments show that fairness and externality arguments are, on average, equally convincing to U.S. respondents, but fairness arguments elicit substantially more outrage.
• An educational divide emerges: respondents without a college degree find fairness arguments more convincing, while college-educated respondents evaluate both argument types similarly; legislators from more educated constituencies are also more likely to use externality arguments.

AUTHORS*

• Morten Nyborg Støstad, FAIR Institute, Department of Economics, NHH Norwegian School of Economics
• Max Lobeck, Federal Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate Action
• Chloé de Meulenaer, London School of Economics

*Author order was randomized.

PRESS

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