Citizens have hundreds of acquaintances: past and present co-workers, neighbours, supermarket cashiers, parents at their children’s school, and others they would greet or stop to chat with if they encountered them on the street. Most of these relationships are not intimate. Yet, while each intimate tie may matter more than each non-intimate tie, together, these hundreds of acquaintances still have a real impact on people’s lives. They complement intimate ties, for instance, by providing support in emergencies when friends and close relatives are absent. They also have distinct functions compared to intimate ties, such as spreading information about job vacancies or houses available on the market and other news that can help people. 

Additionally, acquaintances expose people to the lives of others, showing them how other social groups live. Therefore, earlier research has suggested that having acquaintances with different living conditions can increase one’s empathy and solidarity with other groups. These vicarious experiences can then inform people’s political opinions, much like their own living conditions and the information gleaned from the press do. 

If all citizens had circles of acquaintances that resembled society at large, acquaintances would exert a homogeneous influence on people, making it more likely that they would express similar opinions about society. However, networks are seldom as diverse as the society in which they are embedded. Some people are more heavily exposed to certain social groups than others, potentially contributing to their differential perceptions of society. 

A national, face-to-face survey with 1,500 participants, conducted by the COALESCE Lab of the Autonomous University of Barcelona and funded by the Social Observatory of the ”la Caixa” Foundation, explored the acquaintanceship networks of residents of Spain and related them to their political opinions to test these assumptions. People with low household incomes were expected to support economic redistribution and social protection regardless of their acquaintances, and people with high household incomes were expected to be more supportive if they had more acquaintances in low-income occupations or unemployment. The results were surprisingly different. 

To get an idea of people’s acquaintances, the researchers asked respondents how many people they knew from a set of 14 occupations with varying job prestige and income levels, including domestic and office cleaners, construction workers, architects, and lawyers. Respondents were also asked how many unemployed people they knew and how many second-home owners. Furthermore, respondents were asked about their own net monthly household incomes, as these were expected to shape their opinions regarding redistribution more than their personal salaries. 

Individuals varied substantially in the number of people they knew with different occupations. In part, this variation was associated with their own net monthly household income. For instance, people with high household incomes knew, on average, more engineers but fewer postal employees and unemployed people than people with low incomes did. Some other occupations (such as construction workers) were pretty stable across respondents’ household income groups. 

In total, respondents identified between 0 and 154 acquaintances with these 14 occupations, with an average of 36. Excluding respondents who did not identify acquaintances for any occupation, we estimated the weighted average salaries of respondents’ acquaintances by relating the jobs to external information about the average salary of each job in Spain. The acquaintances of people with low household incomes had jobs with an estimated average of 5,000 euros less a year in earnings than those of respondents with high household incomes. 

Respondents were also asked how much they agreed with eight statements about economic redistribution and social protection. Some items were phrased favourably, such as “The government has a responsibility to ensure a reasonable standard of living for unemployed people” or “I support increased funding for government programmes to help people in poverty and unemployed people with education, employment, and social services, even if it would increase my taxes”, and others negatively, like “People should take more responsibility to support themselves” or “It is fair that there are large differences in income between people because that is how differences in effort, training, or responsibility are rewarded”. With factor analysis, these statements were combined in a single “support for economic redistribution and social protection schemes” scale, where higher values represent stronger support. Opinions varied considerably, with approximately 29% opposing increased redistribution and social protection (to different degrees), 13% neutral, and 58% in favour (also to different degrees). 

Predictably, opinions varied with household income. Respondents with lower household incomes supported strong social protection schemes significantly more than respondents with high household incomes did. Furthermore, younger respondents were more supportive than older respondents, and people who were unemployed or had ever been unemployed were also more supportive than those who had never been unemployed. We found no gender effect. Statistically controlling for these individual attributes, the next step in the analysis considered whether attributes of respondents’ acquaintances have any relation with declared support. 

The relation between the estimated average salaries of acquaintances (divided into four approximately equally sized groups: low, middle-low, middle-high, and high), and respondents’ opinions is not as straightforward as expected: support for social protection was not higher but lower when respondents’ acquaintances had low-paid jobs than when they had middle-earnings jobs, for respondents of all household income groups. Thus, knowing people with low-paid jobs seems to strengthen their belief that people should take responsibility for themselves rather than solidarity, even among respondents who themselves have low household incomes. People whose acquaintances had high-paid jobs also supported social protection schemes less and self-sufficiency more, suggesting that solidarity with people with high-paid jobs’ interests is higher than with people with low-paid jobs’ interests. 

Having more unemployed acquaintances coincided with stronger support for social protection among low- and middle-income – but not high-income – people. Only high-income earners who knew one to six unemployed people showed, on average, support for social protection schemes, but this support dropped when the number of unemployed people grew. 

After controlling for respondents’ gender, age, completed level of education, net monthly household income, and current employment status, acquaintances’ estimated income was still significantly associated with respondents’ opinions. 

The results demonstrate that individuals base their political opinions about economic redistribution and social protection not only on their own household incomes, but also on the earnings of the jobs of persons in their immediate social environment. Contrary to expectations, higher exposure to people with low-paid jobs was associated with lower, rather than higher, support for redistribution and social protection, even among people who had low household incomes themselves. Higher exposure to people with high-paid jobs, particularly among those who had high household incomes, was also linked to lower support for redistribution. Exposure to unemployed people was associated with higher support, as expected, except among people with high household incomes. The results urge further research into the causal mechanisms underlying these associations and the conditions under which they happen. 

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