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Standard political economy models of redistribution, notably that of Meltzer and Richard (1981), fail to account for the remarkable variance in government redistribution across democracies. We develop a general model of redistribution that explains why some democratic governments are more prone to redistribute than others. We show that the electoral system plays a key role because it shapes the nature of political parties and the composition of governing coalitions, hence redistribution. Our argument implies (1) that center-left governments dominate under PR systems, whereas center-right governments dominate under majoritarian systems; and (2) 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.
Why do some countries redistribute more than others? Most work on the politics of redistribution starts from the premise that democratic institutions empower those who stand to benefit from redistribution. The basic logic is succinctly captured in the Meltzer-Richard (1981) model, where the voter with the median income is also the decisive voter. With a typical right-skewed distribution of income, the median voter will push for redistributive spending up to the point where the benefit of such spending to the median voter is outweighed by the efficiency costs of distortionary taxation.
This argument implies that redistibution is much greater in democracies than in nondemocracies (at least of the right-authoritarian variety), and that, among the latter, inegalitarian societies redistribute more than egalitarian ones. There is some evidence to support the first implication, although it is disputed (see Ross 2005), but most of the variance in redistribution is probably within the same regime type. According to data from the Luxembourg Income Study, for example, the reduction in the poverty rate in United States as a result of taxation and transfers was 13% in 1994, whereas the comparable figure for Sweden was 82% (the poverty rate is the percentage of households below 50% of the median income). To explain this variance, we have to look at political and economic differences among democracies, but the second implication-that inegalitarian societies redistribute more-turns out to be of little help. In fact the empirical relationship between inequality and redistribution is the opposite of the predicted one (see Bénabou 1996; Moene and Wallerstein 2001; Perotti 1996)....