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The central task of this paper is to explore the relationship between income inequality, electoral turnout and government redistribution in the developed countries. The paper begins with a cross-national analysis of 14 countries over the period from the late 1970s through the mid 2000s that explores both the sources of variation in electoral turnout and the effect of turnout on government redistribution, making use of data from the Luxembourg Income Study and other sources. The paper then offers a multilevel analysis of the relationship between income and voting, employing data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems. The central findings are as follows. First, income inequality is negatively related to electoral turnout and turnout is positively related to the extent of government redistribution, even when other variables are taken into account. And, second, the mechanism by which turnout is associated with redistributive policies reflects a process whereby, as electoral participation declines, the actual electorate becomes less representative of the potential electorate with respect to income, which in turn has consequences for public sector redistributive policies. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers an empirical assessment of the sources of variance in government redistribution in the developed world over the last two decades. The paper begins by describing data on redistribution via taxes and transfers that have been calculated from micro-data available in the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) database. Comparative data are presented not only for overall redistribution across all income groups, but also for several individual social program types, and income and demographic groups. The paper then goes on to consider four broad themes in the literature on government redistribution: the median voter approach, which argues that redistribution is associated with inequality in pre-government income; the power resources approach, which emphasizes partisan political contestation and electoral participation; the institutional approach, which focuses on political institutions such as the nature of the electoral system; and the globalization approach, which argues that economic globalization has fostered a "race to the bottom" whereby government efforts to provide social protection are increasingly constrained by the exigencies of global competition. The paper finds reasonably strong relationships between government redistribution and three variables representing these theoretical perspectives: the extent of pre-government inequality; the level of electoral turnout; and whether elections to national legislatures employ majoritarian or proportional representation electoral systems. Beyond these broad findings, the paper offers a good deal of detail concerning the relationship between specific modes of government redistribution and individual independent variables, a level of specificity that is made possible by the flexibility, detail and cross-national comparability of LIS data on household income. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent successes of Jean Marie Le Pen?s National Front and Jörg Haider?s Freedom Party, to name just a few, have generated a great deal of anxiety among those concerned about the maintenance of liberal values in European societies. In particular, many commentators point to the xenophobic rhetoric these politicians and their supporters espouse, including Le Pen?s claim that France?s economic problems are linked to immigration. Others suggest that these electoral successes spring from poor economic performance or the weakening of Europe?s established political parties on the left and the right. Whatever the explanation, the sudden surge of support for extreme right parties (ERPs) since the 1980s challenges our understanding of democratic politics in Europe, presenting researchers with the task of formulating new hypotheses seeking to explain these developments. Although existing research contributes a great deal to our understanding of the rise of ERPs, no single theory has come to dominate the academic literature. At least three major weaknesses exist in most of the work to date. First, quantitative comparative studies focus almost exclusively on the nation-state, obscuring critical intra-country variance in votes for ERPs, concentrations of immigrants, economic conditions and other significant variables. It is well-known, for example, that the spatial distribution of electoral support for Austria?s Freedom Party, Italy?s Northern League and the Flemish Block in Belgium varies widely, yet few studies explore this dimension. Second, although much of the literature finds a link between national economic conditions, immigration and support for ERPs, studies to date have focused exclusively on unemployment, neglecting other measures of economic distress such as poverty and income inequality Finally, despite recent evidence suggesting that welfare-state generosity reduces support for ERPs (Swank and Betz, 2003), little effort has been made to confirm these findings at the regional level. This last point is particularly relevant since ERPs often espouse ?welfare chauvinism,? seeking to limit the benefits of the social welfare state to the native-born population (Kitschelt, 1995). In addressing these gaps in the literature, we take advantage of constituency-level electoral data (from Caramani, 2000) to compute regional vote shares for ERPs in national elections in nine countries in the 1990s: Austria (1995), Belgium (1995), Denmark (1994), Finland (1995), France (1997), Germany (1994), Italy (1996), Spain (1993) and the U.K. (1997). These data enable us to measure institutional factors such as the proportionality of electoral systems at the regional level, factors which previous research suggests are positively associated with electoral support for ERPs. In addition, we estimate sub-national levels of poverty, income inequality and welfare generosity as well as such widely examined variables as immigration and percent unemployed. With respect to methods, we employ Tobit analysis, which accounts for the ?left-censoring? of the dependent variable and include country dummy variables to capture unspecified country-level effects manifested in spatial autocorrelation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) offers micro-data on public and private sources of income for over 25 countries for as many as five points in time, covering the period between the early 1980s and early 2000s. The aim of this paper is to offer an overview of the many opportunities the LIS data set provides to measure state redistribution in the developed countries. Two specific tasks will be undertaken. First, and most important, the paper will offer a detailed discussion of a number of aspects of state redistribution, presenting a good deal of newly computed data that are, to our knowledge, unavailable elsewhere. LIS data are detailed enough to allow us not only to measure overall redistribution, but also to explore whether redistribution has been achieved primarily through taxes or transfers; to determine whether it is associated with the size or the internal target efficiency of social benefits; to compare the redistributive effect of the most important individual transfers; to focus separately on redistribution across all income groups, lower, middle and upper income groups, and those in poverty; and to examine separately households headed by persons of working age. Second, the paper will attempt to place state redistribution in a broader context by discussing several aspects of redistribution that are not directly measured in LIS surveys. These include the redistributive effect of in-kind benefits, particularly for education, which we will explore using an imputation method; and second-order effects, whereby direct transfers affect ?pre-government? private sector income, in turn affecting measures of direct state transfers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]