It's all politics: the political economy of non-core countries in the era of globalization

The first paper, Politics and Income Inequality: Does Politics Still Matter in New Democracies? tests the hypotheses about the effects of political institutions on income inequality with unbalanced pooled time-series cross-sectional data that cover 37 fledgling democracies for 1975-2006. The evidence suggests that a parliamentary system and more years of democracy are substantially more likely to be associated with lower levels of income inequality, but a left government and proportional representation do not play a significant role in distributional outcomes. In the second paper, No Taxation, No Democracy? Taxation, Income Inequality, and Democracy, using event history models to analyze a pooled dataset of regime transitions that cover all countries for 1970-2000, I find that taxation has a conditional impact on democratization, but not on democratic breakdown; higher taxation levels and greater income inequality should tend to promote democracy. Finally, in the third paper, Asian Democracies and the Public Sector: The Political Economy of Globalization, analyzing a pooled dataset for the domestic public sector (excluding military spending) in 18 Asian countries for 1960-2005, I find that, in general, democracy is associated with larger size of government; in particular, partial democracies are likely to go through more speedy expansion in the domestic public sector as trade increases; yet, democracy and partial democracy appear to play a little role in reference to the increase in foreign direct investment