The Structure of Inequality and the Politics of Redistribution

By Noam Lupu. American Political Science Review, 2011

429 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Against the current consensus among comparative political economists, we argue that inequality matters for redistributive politics in advanced capitalist societies, but it is the structure of inequality, not the level of inequality, that matters. Our theory posits that middle-income voters will be inclined to ally with low-income voters and support redistributive policies when the distance between the middle and the poor is small relative to the distance between the middle and the rich. We test this proposition with data from 15 to 18 advanced democracies and find that both redistribution and nonelderly social spending increase as the dispersion of earnings in the upper half of the distribution increases relative to the dispersion of earnings in the lower half of the distribution. In addition, we present survey evidence on preferences for redistribution among middle-income voters that is consistent with our theory and regression results indicating that left parties are more likely to participate in government when the structure of inequality is characterized by skew.

Subfields: Political Science and International Relations, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/02491295c322af452cc758e4718b51de74b96c68

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Citations in the corpus

Economic inequality and public demand for redistribution: combining cross-sectional and longitudinal evidence (2016, background): “In practice however, income inequality and skewness are highly correlated (0.71 in Lupu and Pontusson, 2011, p. 326) and, therefore, the argument of Lupu and Pontusson might also be relevant for the relationship between inequality and demand for redistribution.”
The effect of macroeconomic and social conditions on the demand for redistribution: A pseudo panel approach (2013, methodology): “More sophisticated versions of the M-R model have been proposed that emphasise the social insurance aspect of redistribution (Moene and Wallerstein, 2001, 2003), the shape of the income distribution (Lupu and Pontusson, 2011), and the mediating role of institutional and political factors (Bradley et”
The Two Facets of Social Policy Preferences (2014, background): “Studies that do explore changes over time usually look at spending levels, sidestepping the more general question of how attitudes to redistribution have changed (Iversen and Cusack 2000; Lupu and Pontusson 2011; Moene and Wallerstein 2001, 2003).”
The Altruistic Rich? Inequality and Other-Regarding Preferences for Redistribution (2017, background): “In a signifcant contribution to the literature on redistribution, Lupu and Pontusson (2011) propose that macro-levels of equality are related to empathy.”
Individuals, interactions and institutions: How economic inequality affects organizations (2015, background): “As inequality increases the distance between the rich and the rest, and decreases the distance between the middle and the poor, pressures for redistributive policies grow in society (Lupu and Pontusson, 2011).”