How does party fractionalization convey preferences for redistribution in parliamentary democracies?

Bruno Amable, Donatella Gatti and Elvire Guillaud

PSE Working Papers from HAL

Abstract: In this paper, we highlight the link between the political demand and social policy outcome while taking into account the design of the party system. The political demand is measured by individual preferences and the design of the party system is defined as the extent of party fractionalization. This is, to our knowledge, the first attempt in the literature to empirically link the political demand and the policy outcome with the help of a direct measure of preferences. Moreover, we account for an additional channel, so far neglected in the literature: The composition effect of the demand. Indeed, the heterogeneity of the demand within countries, more than the level of the demand itself, is shown to have a positive impact on welfare state generosity. This impact increases with the degree of fractionalization of the party system. We run regressions on a sample of 18 OECD countries over 23 years, carefully dealing with the issues raised by the use of time-series cross-section data.

Keywords: political demand; party fractionalization; redistribution; time-series cross-section data (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008-07
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://shs.hal.science/halshs-00586259v1
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://shs.hal.science/halshs-00586259v1/document (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: How does Party Fractionalization convey Preferences for Redistribution in Parliamentary Democracies? (2008)
Working Paper: How does party fractionalization convey preferences for redistribution in parliamentary democracies? (2008)
Working Paper: How does Party Fractionalization convey Preferences for Redistribution in Parliamentary Democracies? (2008)
Working Paper: How does party fractionalization convey preferences for redistribution in parliamentary democracies? (2008)
Working Paper: How does party fractionalization convey preferences for redistribution in parliamentary democracies? (2008)
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:hal:psewpa:halshs-00586259

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in PSE Working Papers from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().