收入差距、不平等感知与公众容忍度

本文辨析和检验了收入不平等的两种表现形式及其对公众容忍度的影响效应。研究结果显示，客观收入差距对公众容忍度并无直接影响，而感知的收入差距越大，对不平等的厌恶倾向越明显。但客观差距大并不意味着个体感知到的差距大，感知偏差及情境分割效应的存在，区县而非省级、时下而非过往的收入差距状况更易为个体所捕捉和感知，进而对其容忍度产生间接影响，且这种情境传导效应及对客观差距的感知程度在不同群体间有明显差异。这一结果为我们理解过大收入差距与较高容忍度共存的反差现象提供了基于分配结构异质性的观察视角和情境反应在地化的经验解释。

Income Disparity,Perceptions of Inequality and Public Tolerance

In the process of rapid transition, high income inequality and high public tolerance coexist in China. This phenomenon and its empirical and theoretical conundrum require exploration and explanation. With data from the CGSS2013, this article identifies and tests two forms of income inequality and their impacts on public tolerance. Analytical results of the mediating effect of “social context-subject perception” suggest that objective income inequality and perceived inequality have different effects on public tolerance. The statistics data constantly show that the objective income gap has no direct impact on public tolerance. But the larger the perceived income gap, the less it is tolerated. Meanwhile, actual big gaps do not warrant accurate perception from individuals. The existence of “perception bias” and contextual segmentation effects makes it easier for individuals to “capture” disparate income gaps at the district and county level rather than at the provincial level, and at the current time rather than in the past. The misperception of objective inequality manifests differently among subgroups. Females, urban residents as well as groups with medium education level, high income and good access to information are often more sensitive to the inequality. There is also a N-shaped relation curve between age and perceived income inequality. The results point to the heterogeneous effects of distribution structure and localization of individual perceptions as the key to explain the paradox between high income inequality and high public tolerance. In other words, it is due to the status structure constraints and temporal-spatial conditions that majority of the citizens see the current income gap being within its tolerable limits. The implication of this study is that one should not take the public tolerance of status quolightly but make greater effort to optimize the regional income distribution structure.