The State of Emerging Democracies

Takeshi Kawanaka () and Yasushi Hazama ()
Additional contact information
Takeshi Kawanaka: Japan External Trade Organization
Yasushi Hazama: Japan External Trade Organization

Chapter Chapter 3 in Political Determinants of Income Inequality in Emerging Democracies, 2016, pp 43-55 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract Emerging democracies generally have higher levels of inequality than advanced democracies. Furthermore, variations in inequality levels within emerging democracies are larger than such variations within advanced democracies. In addition to examining these two characteristics, this chapter provides descriptive information on the three independent variables that form the focus of this study: multidimensional preferences, the quality of the political market, and the level of state capacity. We find correlations between inequality levels and three variables as measured by proxies, which are ethnic fractionalization (a proxy for multidimensionality), clientelistic practices by political parties (a proxy for failure of the political market), and the Quality of Government indicator from International Country Risk Guide (a measurement of state capacity). Emerging democracies tend to be ethnically more fractionalized, more clientelistic in terms of party systems, and weaker with respect to state capacity. Moreover, we find that these three variables exhibit larger variability in emerging democracies than in advanced democracies. This descriptive information indicates that these political factors need to be included when exploring the causal mechanisms of inequality in emerging democracies.

Keywords: Inequality; Preferences; Political market; State capacity; Information; Ethnicity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
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:spr:spbchp:978-981-10-0257-1_3

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/9789811002571

DOI: 10.1007/978-981-10-0257-1_3

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in SpringerBriefs in Economics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().