LEFT, RIGHT, LEFT: INCOME DYNAMICS AND THE EVOLVING POLITICAL PREFERENCES OF FORWARD-LOOKING BAYESIAN VOTERS

Michael Carter and John Morrow

STICERD - Economic Organisation and Public Policy Discussion Papers Series from Suntory and Toyota International Centres for Economics and Related Disciplines, LSE

Abstract: The political left turn in Latin America, which lagged its transition to liberalized market economies by a decade or more, challenges conventional economic explanations of voting behavior. While the implications of upward mobility for the political preferences of forward-looking voters have been studied, neither the upward mobility model nor conventional myopic median voter models are well equipped to explain Latin America's political transformation. This paper generalizes the forward-looking voter model to consider a broad range of dynamic processes. When voters have full information on the nature of income dynamics in a transition economy, we show that strong support for redistributive policies will materialize rapidly if income dynamics offer few prospects of upward mobility for key sections of the electorate. In contrast, when voters have imperfect information, our model predicts a slow and politically polarizing shift toward redistributive voter preferences under these same non-concave income dynamics. Simulation using fitted income dynamics for two Latin American economies suggests that the imperfect information model better accounts for the observed shift back to the left in Latin America, and that this generalized, forward-looking voter approach may offer additional insights about political dynamics in other transition economies.

Keywords: income dynamics; redistributive politics; polarization; Bayesian learning; Latin America. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D31 D72 D83 P16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lam and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Related works:
Working Paper: Left, right, left: income dynamics and the evolving political preferences of forward-looking Bayesian voters (2012)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cep:stieop:034

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