Left, right, left: income, learning and political dynamics

John Morrow and Michael Carter

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

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. This paper generalizes the forward-looking voter model to a broad range of dynamic, non-concave income processes. The model implies support for redistributive policies materializes rapidly if few prospects of upward mobility are present. In contrast, under imperfect information, a slow and polarizing shift toward redistributive preferences occurs. Simulation using fitted income dynamics suggests that imperfect information better accounts for the shift back to the left, and offers additional insights about political dynamics.

Keywords: income dynamics; redistributive politics; polarization; Bayesian learning; Latin America (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D3 D7 D8 P1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013-02-23
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-lam and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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Related works:
Working Paper: Left, Right, Left: Income, Learning and Political Dynamics (2013)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:45020

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