Inequality and Democratization: Individual-Level Evidence of Preferences for Redistribution under Autocracy

While some research has explored the relationship between individual income and demand for redistribution under democracy--finding little support for median-voter theories of redistribution--no research has explored this relationship under autocracy, even though this connection is a crucial assumption of redistributivist theories of democratization (Boix 2003; Acemoglu and Robinson 2006). We explore the relationship between individual income and support for redistributive government policies in autocratic societies using micro-level data from the World Values Surveys, finding no empirical support for the core assumption of median-voter models that regime change is a function of elites ’ fear of the redistributive demands of the poor