Two groups display the highest support for generous redistribution to policies: (1) low-income beneficiaries, irrespective of their reciprocity beliefs, and (2) high-income contributors who trust that these policies benefit deserving recipients. This coalition is held together by redistribution to policies’ asymmetric economic implications. For low-income beneficiaries, redistribution to policies are high stakes, explaining high baseline support irrespective of reciprocity beliefs. In contrast, the uncertainty over the costs to high-income contributors of more generous redistribution to policies favors fairness reasoning, explaining higher than expected support within this group. Chapter 7 argues that fiscal stress, in the form of fiscal adjustment, can introduce a wedge in this pro-redistribution to coalition. Indeed, when the tax implications of generous social spending are no longer a hypothetical, it becomes much easier for people to reason from the perspective of their own pocketbook. In such a context, high-income respondents will react by choosing to concentrate financial efforts on social programs they directly benefit from, at the expense of redistribution to policies.

This chapter introduces the book’s main research question, that is, the fact that rising inequality does not appear to benefit an egalitarian redistributive agenda. It shows how, in Great Britain, despite a sharp rise in income inequality, agreement with the claim that the government should redistribute income from the rich to the poor has decreased over time. In the United States, overall stability in mass support for redistribution hides a decline in the attitudinal gap between the high- and low-income respondents, despite expectations that this gap should increase with income inequality. How can this empirical evidence be reconciled with reasonable assumptions underpinning expectations of rising support for redistribution? Under what conditions can attitudes toward redistributive social policies change and act as a countervailing force to rising inequality? The remainder of the chapter lays out the book's answers to these questions and presents the empirical strategy. A central claim is that attitudes toward redistributive social policies are shaped by at least two motives, material self-interest and fairness reasoning, and that the relative importance of each is situational.

The work by Elizabeth Bott is still mentioned as a "hypothesis" even though it has inspired many researchers over generations, pointing out that the subject is not closed. She raised a new fundamental question about the link between network structure and the forms of conjugality, which remains relevant in a world that has evolved in the social, cultural, and scientific domains. Networks are considered not only an object of research, rather they shed light on other objects (way of life, culture, behaviors, etc.). Today, Bott’s questioning may undergo some shifts as some social realities have changed and the lenses for observing these realities have also progressed. Advances in network analysis and in cultural and gender studies, as well as the more recent emphasis on relational dynamics, all contribute to further explore her question and give new insights on her hypothesis. The greater accuracy of the categories of both network structures (specifying the position of the partner) and conjugal roles (dividing them between norms and practices, then decisions and tasks) allows a more detailed description of their ways of combination. The dynamic dimension makes it possible to differentiate between contrasting processes of building a couple and integrating the partner into people's relational universes.