Does the winner take it all? Redistributive policies and political extremism

Gianmarco Daniele, Amedeo Piolatto and Willem Sas ()
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Massimo Bordignon () and Gilberto TURATI ()

No 2020/01, Working Papers from Institut d'Economia de Barcelona (IEB)

Abstract: We show that regional heterogeneity of underlying fundamentals (e.g. economic history, geography, natural resources, social capital) can lead to extreme voting in federations. When the outcome of federal policies { such as transfer schemes, market regulation, migration targets { depends on these fundamentals, the set of regions that benefits or loses from such a policy is fixed exogenously (for each given policy). This creates a strategic incentive for the median voter to elect extremely protective federal representatives, who will distort redistribution in favour of their constituency by influencing the choice of the policy magnitude. Interestingly, the benefits of selecting tough negotiators outweigh those of belonging to the ruling coalition. We test our predictions by looking at parties' performances at national and European Parliament elections from 1990 onwards, and find that strategic voting is indeed U-shaped: winning and losing member states vote more extremely than those in the middle. Our online survey provides further evidence.

Keywords: Strategic Delegation; Interregional Redistribution; Political Extremism; Federalism; Bargaining; Coalitions; EU Elections; Euroscepticism; Populism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H6 H71 H74 H77 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 73 pages
Date: 2020
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-eur and nep-pol
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://ieb.ub.edu/ca/publication/2020-1-does-the- ... political-extremism/ (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Does the Winner Take It All? Redistributive Policies and Political Extremism (2020)
Working Paper: Does the Winner Take It All? Redistributive Policies and Political Extremism (2020)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ieb:wpaper:doc2020-01

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Institut d'Economia de Barcelona (IEB) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().