The size of the difference isn’t enormous – the average share of households who support policy that happens was 57.1% for rich households and 53.7% among low-income ones (the middle class… is in the middle). But what is staggering is how consistent it is across countries and decades.

The effect is clearly less pronounced than it is in the US, however it seems likely that it’s for fairly innocuous reasons.

Europe’s politicians are less wealthy than their US counterparts, and they aren’t generally rich by any wild stretch of the imagination, but they are wealthy enough to often be out of touch with “life on the ground” for a lot of average Europeans. This leads to policy decisions that reflect the positions of people who aren’t worried about where their next meal comes from, and their disconnect from that situation booms loudly. Anyway, that’s what I would be expecting is happening.