The academic literature offers various examples of how conflict over the distribution of resources influences elections, political preferences, and mass political action and as a consequence also everyday politics. The present dissertation explores such processes and illustrates with three examples how established theoretical models and newer ideas can be used to analyze political behavior. The first chapter uses data from many European Union member countries and shows that bad economic performance and especially rising unemployment correlates with lower levels of trust in political institutions. The theoretical model suggests that citizens, who are disappointed with the economy, reduce trust in political institutions. Further, more thorough analyses using the example of Spain show that a massive economic downturn heavily undermines the rustworthiness of representative political institutions. The second chapter analyzes how the income effects of policy reforms influence support for reform in the population. Data from a novel conjoint experiment in the United States shows that it matters how reforms influence one's own income. However, citizens also take into account how such reforms affect the average income. Further analyses suggest that this effect likely stems from American citizen's concern for how policy reforms influence the welfare of the poorest. The last contribution explores the question of what individuals do if they face inequality. Using data from a novel representative survey in the United States and Germany, which varies the randomly assigned inequality between two individuals, shows that they only incompletely equalize payoffs. We classify subjects based on their behavioral responses to inequality and find that the resulting typology helps predict which individuals support real-world policy interventions such as taxing the rich and welfare transfers to the poor. This dissertation thus contributes to the academic l.