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Democracy, party government and rent‐seeking as determinants of distributional inequality in industrial societies
Author(s) -
WEEDE ERICH
Publication year - 1990
Publication title -
european journal of political research
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 3.267
H-Index - 95
eISSN - 1475-6765
pISSN - 0304-4130
DOI - 10.1111/j.1475-6765.1990.tb00246.x
Subject(s) - democracy , redistribution (election) , inequality , rent seeking , government (linguistics) , perspective (graphical) , political economy , political science , economics , politics , law , mathematical analysis , linguistics , philosophy , mathematics , artificial intelligence , computer science
. Previous research arrived at inconsistent conclusions concerning the relationship between democracy and inequality. Here, the focus is on 17 industrial democracies and the incremental effects of democracy as well as of the party composition of governments. It is found that older democracies suffer from less equality than younger democracies, that ruling socialist parties do not score significant successes in redistribution for the benefit of the poorest strata, and that ruling conservative parties benefit the most privileged strata. These findings are put into a public choice perspective, according to which privileged groups win the distributional or rent‐seeking struggles in democracies because of the lack of organization and information of rationally ignorant majorities.