The Use of Multilevel Models in Analysing Contextual Effects of Labour Force Participation Rate on Redistribution Support with Comparative Longitudinal Survey Data

This article studies the links between a country's labour force par ticipation rate and attitudes towards income redistribution.The article also demonstrates how to specify a multilevel model when analysing contextual effects and it presents several types of random effects structures and options for centering explanatory variables in comparative longitudinal survey data.The contextual effect is decomposed into longitudinal and crosssectional components for timevarying contextual variables, such as the labour force participation rate.The analysis of redistribution support based on ESS data from 27 countries and nine rounds shows how fundamentally the mentioned properties can influence substantive conclusions.The analyses presented in this article do not provide any evidence for a link between redistribution sup port and the labour force participation rate.However, the hypothetical con figurations of multilevel models presented here cover all possible substantive effects of the labour force participation rate.Contextual effects analysis may thus lead to highly unreliable results when a multilevel model fails to control for the compositional effects of individuallevel predictors, when it does not specify random effects at the level to which a substantial variation of the out come variable may be attributed, and when it does not distinguish between the longitudinal and crosssectional effects of timevarying variables.