"the Political Sources of Solidarity"

This paper explores the roots of redistributive solidarity understood as the willingness of people within a nation to redistribute resources to the less advantaged.   Focusing on the developed democracies, I assess the viability of two standard explanations for levels of redistributive solidarity, one popular in comparative political economy that associates solidarity with the level of income inequality and another current in political theory that associates solidarity with the quality of national identity. Neither corresponds well to cross-national variations in attitudes toward redistribution.  I develop an alternative approach to redistributive solidarity as a quasi-equilibrium underpinned by the national cultural and institutional frameworks structuring social relations and find more empirical support for it.   I then consider how these frameworks are built, arguing on the basis of historical cases that political movements for social justice are central to the construction of social solidarity, before concluding with observations about the implications of this approach for the problem of preserving solidarity in contexts of ethnic and religious diversity.