doi:10.1017/S0003055410000262 Political Polarization and the Size of Government

In this article, we study the relationship between political polarization and public spending using thedispersion of self-reported political preferences as ourmeasure of polarization. Political polarizationis strongly associated with smaller government in democratic countries, but there is no relationship between polarization and the size of government in undemocratic countries. The results are robust to a large set of control variables, including gross domestic product per capita and income inequality. Countries differ widely in the extent to which theyrely on the government to allocate resources,goods, and services. For example, government consumption in the year 2000 amounted to 34.3 % of total consumption in Sweden as compared to 17.6 % in the United States (Gwartney and Lawson 2008). Such large differences in government size are hard to reconcile with the standard political economy model of redistribution (Meltzer and Richard 1981), where the size of government is determined by the eco-nomic interest of the median voter.1 However, more recent research in economics and political science has suggested that the size of government is also deter-mined by the dispersion or polarization of politica