Essays on the interplay between income inequality and voter turnout

The continued rise of inequality in income and wealth, has attracted an enormous amount of attention which has resulted in a range of explanations offered to explain it. The focus of this thesis instead is a question that has attracted much less analytical scrutiny: how can inequality persist---and even grow---in democracies? Each of the three later chapters of this thesis seeks to offer a partial answer to the seeming puzzle of persistence and growth of inequality in favour of a minority of the population in democracies. The first chapter of this thesis illustrate the scale of the inequality and discusses some of the drivers. Chapter 2 connects voter turnout in a country to the strength of the country's redistributive policies. Using a panel data set we provide empirical evidence that higher rates of voter turnout lead to larger reductions in income inequality due to taxes and transfers. In addition, we show that the degree to which voter turnout influences the reduction in income inequality is increasing in the average income of the country. The third chapter offers another that has helped sustain high post-income inequality since the 1980s: rapid technological progress that is heavily biased in favour of highly educated and high-skill workers and complementarities in production between high-skill and low-skill labour. We argue that this creates an additional disincentive for pursuing redistribution by increasing tax rates. In the fourth chapter we offer a partial explanation for why voter turnout rates have consistently been declining in many parts of the world. We suggest that a rise in the amount of political information in circulation has resulted in more informed voters who would rather abstain than cast a vote for political candidates too far from their own preferred policy position