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Electoral institutions, parties, and the politics of class: Why some democracies redistribute more than others
Torben Iversen, Harvard University
David Soskice, Duke University
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ABSTRACT: We develop a general model of redistribution and use it to account for the remarkable variance
in government redistribution across democracies. We show that the electoral system plays a key
role because it shapes the nature of political parties and the composition of governing coalitions,
whether these are conceived as electoral alliances between classes or alliances between class
parties. Our argument implies a) that center-left governments dominate under PR systems, while
center-right governments dominate under majoritarian systems, and b) 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.
We thank Jim Alt, Klaus Armingeon, Neal Beck, David Brady, Geoffrey Brennan, Gary Cox,
Thomas Cusack, Jeff Frieden, Robert Goodin, Peter Hall, Peter Lange, Peter Katzenstein, Robert
Keohane, Herbert Kitschelt, Gerard Roland, Fritz Scharpf, Ken Shepsle and participants in the
Workshop on the economic consequences of democratic institutions, Department of Political
Science, Duke University, April 1-2, 2005 for their many helpful comments on a previous
version of this paper.
SUGGESTED CITATION:
Torben Iversen and David Soskice,
"Electoral institutions, parties, and the politics of class: Why some democracies redistribute more than others"
(October 24, 2005).
Institute of Governmental Studies.
Paper WP2005-50.
http://repositories.cdlib.org/igs/WP2005-50
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