Ideology and perceptions of inequality

In this chapter, the authors outline the understanding of both ideology and perceptions of inequality, before considering a range of origins of people’s inequality perceptions. They consider evidence for how ideology may influence perceptions of inequality, and what that could mean for contemporary political debates. The authors focus on the potential influence ideology exerts on perceptions of inequality, but they also focus on the reflexive nature of these two constructs by highlighting the implications of varied and biased perceptions of inequality in public debate. They utilise the term ‘inequality perceptions’ to refer to how large or small students perceive the difference in resources between individuals or groups to be, and their perception of how fixed it is. Anti-egalitarianism specifically indexes the extent to which one supports a hierarchical structure of society in which valued goods are distributed unevenly between individuals and social groups.