Voter Preferences and Redistributive Outcomes

• In Event: Unequal Responsiveness in Advanced Democracies

Abstract

A growing literature demonstrates how that policy outputs in the US and other liberal democracies are more likely to conform to the preferences of more affluent voters than to the preferences of the middle class and the poor. So far, this literature has not paid much attention to variation in unequal representation across countries and over time. Such variation potentially provides critical leverage for testing alternative theories of how unequal representation by income comes about. Our paper will focus on income redistribution as a policy domain in which the interests between different income groups clearly diverge. For the period 1985-2016, we have compiled a cross-country dataset of preferences for redistribution by income groups by harmonizing various multi-country survey series such as ISSP and ESS. We are in the process of combining these data with high-quality time-varying, country-specific estimates of redistributive outcomes produced by taxation and transfers based on micro-level household data from the Luxembourg Income Study and EU-SILC. Controlling for macroeconomic conditions, our analysis will explore the extent to which electoral turnout, unionization, government partisanship and public debt (and possibly other macro variables as well) condition links between the preferences of different income groups and redistributive policy outputs.

Authors

• Jonas Pontusson, University of Geneva

• Konstantin Käppner, University of Konstanz

• Jeremie Poltier, University of Geneva

• Max Joosten