Does the Regulative State Fuel Populism?

Policy is heavily based upon perceptions of voters, but one of the main things that does not seem to cause voter perceptions is reality. A paper by Gimple Sen and Triesman on public perceptions of inequality around the world finds barely any connection between perceived inequality in a country and actual inequality in the country. Even more impressively, they find no correlation at all between changes in inequality in the real world and changes in perceived inequality. This means, for example, every free market person who has said, let's have some more redistribution because then people won't be so worried about inequality... Wrong, wrong, wrong.