Electoral Institutions and the Politics of Coalitions: Why Some Democracies Redistribute More than Others

Standard political economy models of redistribution, notably that of Meltzer and Richard (1981),fail to account for the remarkable variance in government redistribution across democracies. Wedevelop a general model of redistribution that explains why some democratic governments are more prone to redistribute than others. We show that the electoral system plays a key role because it shapes the nature of political parties and the composition of governing coalitions, hence redistribution. Our argument implies (1) that center-left governments dominate under PR systems, whereas center-right governments dominate under majoritarian systems; and (2) that PR systems redistribute more than majoritarian systems. We test our argument on panel data for redistribution, government partisanship, and electoral system in advanced democracies. Why do some countries redistribute more thanothers? Most work on the politics of redis-tribution starts from the premise that demo-cratic institutions empower those who stand to benefit from redistribution. The basic logic is succinctly cap-tured in the Meltzer–Richard (1981) model, where the voter with themedian income is also the decisive voter. With a typical right-skewed distribution of income, the median voter will push for redistributive spending up to the point where the benefit of such spending to th