Voting for Growth, Fairness, or Inequality? Class-Biased Economic Voting in Comparative Perspective (original) (raw)
Related papers
2013
A growing literature has inquired into the political consequences of rising income inequality in the United States. Scholars have identified a number of mechanisms through which American democracy has become more responsive to the interests of the very rich than to the those of lower-and middle-class citizens. Among the patterns of unequal influence that analysts have observed is a strong "class bias in economic voting" identified by . Specifically, Bartels finds that lower-and middle-class voters are far more responsive to election-year income growth among the richest Americans than they are to overall economic growth or to growth within their own income brackets. In this paper, we examine this troubling feature of U.S. electoral politics in comparative perspective, asking (i.) how widespread class biases in economic voting are in advanced democracies and (ii.) what generates them. Analyzing electoral behavior in three OECD countries (Canada, Sweden, and the United Kingdom), we find clear evidence of classbiased economic voting with substantively important electoral consequences outside the United States. Most surprisingly, we find that the class bias is not limited to national contexts characterized by market-liberal norms and institutions. We then propose two possible mechanisms that might contribute to the class bias -an informational mechanism and an ideological mechanism -and test for their operation in the United States and Sweden. The results are highly consistent with the operation of both mechanisms in the United States and weakly suggestive of an informational effect in Sweden.
Electoral Systems and Economic Inequality : A Tale of Political Equality ∗
2017
Do electoral institutions have an effect on income inequality? Does political inequality play a role in the potential aftermath of electoral rules on income inequality? This paper provides a Downsian model of political competition in which electoral systems represent differently the individuals’ preferences of income inequality. Empirically, I employ a panel data of 118 democracies during 1960-2015, and find that proportional systems might improve income inequality through its interaction with political equality. Unpacking this mechanism and understanding how it works is of crucial importance to the design of pro-equality electoral systems, and democratic institutions at large. ∗I appreciate the help of Adam Przeworski in guiding and inspiring this research. For comments, I am grateful to Joan Maria Esteban, Shanker Satyantath and David Stasavage, as well as to my Ph.D. advisors Josu Arteche and Annick Laurelle. This paper was born during my visiting appointment at the Wilf Family D...
Electoral systems and income inequality: a tale of political equality
Empirical Economics
The link between democracy and within-country income inequality remains an unresolved quest in the literature of political economy. To look into this debate, I propose exploring the implications of electoral systems, rather than political regimes, on income inequality. I surmise that proportional representation systems should be associated with lower income inequality than majoritarian or mixed systems. Further, I conjecture that the relationship between electoral systems and income inequality hinges on the de facto distribution of real political power, namely political equality. I use data on 85 countries covering the period 1960–2016 and specify models able to capture the persistence and mean reversion of income inequality. The estimates fail to significantly associate democracy with income inequality, and find other political institutions to significantly shape income inequality. The paper finds a robust association between more proportional systems and lower income inequality. H...
Individual income and voting for redistribution across democracies
We analyze the relationship between individual income and vote choice across 23 democracies. Our goal is to understand how the economic, social and institutional context affects support by low-, middle-and high-income voters for political parties that oppose taxes and redistribution. We examine how macro level variables related to ethnic heterogeneity, national wealth, electoral laws, and party systems affect the "redistributive center of gravity" (the propensity for all voters in a country to support right-wing parties') and income-based voting polarization (i.e., differences in voting by different income groups).
Institute of Governmental Studies, 2005
We develop a general model of redistribution and use it to account for the remarkable variance in government redistribution across democracies. We show that the electoral system plays a key role because it shapes the nature of political parties and the composition of governing coalitions, whether these are conceived as electoral alliances between classes or alliances between class parties. Our argument implies a) that center-left governments dominate under PR systems, while center-right governments dominate under majoritarian systems, and b) that PR systems redistribute more than majoritarian systems. We test our argument on panel data for redistribution, government partisanship, and electoral system in advanced democracies.
Changes in the distribution of income and its impact on electoral outcomes (Bachelor Thesis)
2016
This thesis addresses the question whether changes in the distribution of income have an impact on the outcome of elections. The research is an attempt to provide scientific insights that help to understand the dynamics between the electorate and government. Is it necessary for incumbent parties to put efforts into the provision of income equality in order to be re-elected? The answer will be mainly based on assumptions of Public Choice Theory and the responsibility hypothesis which states that a voter holds his or her government responsible for the economic performance of a country. By applying the underlying assumptions of scientific literature and a cross-country comparison of thirty elections in thirteen European Union member states in the time period from 2005-2012, it will be shown that the voter’s support sinks with increasing redistribution efforts of a government and vice versa. Furthermore, the outcomes of elections defined by their representation of public political opinion are part of the analysis. The average public opinion will be depicted by calculating the mean of all parties’ right-left positions in a parliament and weighting them by each party’s election result. A correlation between the level of the redistribution of income and a movement of public opinion along the right-left spectre of political views, as well as the diversity of political views will be observed. In the end, it will be shown that changes in the distribution of income matter for the outcome of election as shown by evidence from European Union member states.
The Income Gap in Voting: Moderating Effects of Income Inequality and Clientelism
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We investigated whether income gaps in voting turnout vary with country-level economic inequality, and whether this pattern differs between wealthier and less-wealthy countries. Moreover, we investigated whether the prevalence of clientelism was the underlying mechanism that accounts for the presumed negative interaction between relative income and economic inequality at lower levels of national wealth per capita. The harmonised PolPart dataset, combining cross-national surveys from 66 countries and 292 country-years, including 510,184 individuals, was analysed using multilevel logistic regression models. We found that the positive effect of relative income on voting was weaker at higher levels of economic inequality, independent of the level of national wealth. Although clientelism partially explains why economic inequality reduces the income gap in voter turnout, it does not do so in the way we expected. It seems to decrease turnout of higher income groups, rather than increase tu...
Democratic theory does not require the government just to respond to citizens’ preferences for policy but in doing so, to treat all citizens as political equals. It follows that, in democracies, government policy should respond equally to different economic classes: if the policy preferences of the rich and the poor differ, then policy should reflect no less the preferences of the poor than those of the rich. Whether this is indeed happens becomes all the more relevant in the context of the current financial and economic crisis. In Europe, policy solutions to the crisis, namely austerity, including budget and wage cuts that hurt the middle and lower classes, have been met with fierce public resistance. Popular dissatisfaction with policy raises the questions: Does policy respond to public attitudes towards policies? To which sub-constituency’s preferences does government policy respond? Do policy outputs reflect the preferences and attitudes of the rich rather than low-income citizens? To answer these questions, we introduce a new data set covering policy and public opinion across a range of issues, countries, and times. We first examine variation in public attitudes across 15 policy issues throughout time. We focus on whether citizens’ attitudes towards income inequality, their preferences for government spending in key policy areas and their attitudes towards policy issues differ according to income. Second, we investigate whether government responsiveness differs across income groups over time and present new evidence of policy responsiveness and inequality in Europe.
The Nexus of Political Inequality and Economic Inequality in Established Democracies
It is widely accepted that citizens are not politically equal in economically unequal societies, and that political inequality in turn has a detrimental effect on the distributive process. However, there has been a lack of empirical evidence about this relationship largely because measures of political inequality are not well developed. To explore the puzzle, this article first constructs the Political Inequality Index (PII) that is composed of two dimensions: political participation and representation, which reflect the equality of political voice. The index builds on a middle-range approach that excludes both equality of voting and equality of political outcomes and covers 69 democracies over the period between 1990 and 2012. This inquiry then investigates the reciprocal relationship between political inequality and two distributive stages (market inequality and redistribution), using both the OLS and 2SLS estimation. Overall, the results do not support that there is significant endogenous effects between political inequality and economic inequality, while controlling for a host of economic, social, and political factors, although there exists some evidence of correlation.