How Learning about Poverty Affects Support for Redistribution in Italy

This paper presents evidence from a large-scale randomized survey experiment (N = 2,000) conducted in Italy in 2024 to examine whether providing individuals with objective information about their economic position, measured as the distance between their household income and the poverty line, influences their preferences for redistribution. We consider four dimensions of redistributive preferences: government responsibility for reducing income inequality, perceptions of inequality as a fair reward for talent and effort, support for progressive taxation, and support for government anti-poverty measures. Building on rational learning theory, we hypothesize that individuals who learn that their household income is closer to the poverty line than they previously believed will express stronger support for redistribution than those in the control group, whereas those who learn that their income is further from the poverty line than they believed will express weaker support. The results show that corrective information affects redistributive preferences in a nuanced way. Support for progressive taxation is responsive to the information treatment, whereas broader normative attitudes toward inequality and support for government anti-poverty policies remain largely unchanged.