Inequality and redistribution: Parties do matter

• 발행기관: 한국재정학회(구 한국재정·공공경제학회)
• 저자명: Woojin Lee Cheolbeom Park
• 간행물 정보: 『한국재정학회 학술대회 논문집』2012년도 한국재정학회 추계 정기학술대회, 1557~1579쪽, 전체 23쪽
• 주제분류: 경제경영 > 경제학
• 파일형태: PDF
• 발행일자: 2012.09.07

영문 초록

A large body of literature written by political scientists and social historians has long emphasized the role of political parties in shaping the welfare state policies. The theoretical core of this voluminous literature is that there are significant party differences in welfare state policies (Schmidt, 2010). In this paper, we study the relationship between inequality and redistribution using two ‘partisan’ models of political competition - the Wittman-Roemer model and what we call the ideological party model. We show that ‘political parties do matter' in explaining how redistribution changes in response to changes in inequality. As inequality increases, the Left party tends to propose more redistribution, while the Right party tends to propose less redistribution. The argument that the Left and the Right parties may respond differently to changes in inequality first appeared in Lee and Roemer (2005) as a subsidiary argument, when they mainly studied the inverse U-shaped relationship between inequality and the support for the unionized labor market regime. This paper improves upon Lee and Roemer’s (2005) analysis. First, their result is based upon numerical calculations. In this paper, we provide an analytically tractable model, and produce a closed form solution. Second, because there was an interaction between political parties and the labor union in Lee and Roemer (2005), it was not clear whether the result is purely driven by partisan politics or to its interaction with the union. We show that the result is a generic feature of partisan politics. Third, we made improvements upon empirical testing of the hypothesis.

목차

Abstract

1. Introduction

2. The model

3. Inequality and redistribution

4. Empirical assessment ofthe implications ofthe various models

5. Conclusion

키워드

inequality redistribution Hotelling-Downs model classical Wittman-Roemer model ideological-party model