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Growing economic inequality has raised concerns that democratic governments are no longer responsive to popular demands for redistribution either because the state capacity is eroded by footloose capital or because the wealthy subvert democracy through the power of money. In this paper we critically assess these conjectures against long-standing arguments about redistribution and insurance under democracy. We test the alternatives on a new comprehensive dataset on income inequality from 17 advanced democracies between 1980 and 2019. We find that before taxes and transfers income inequality has increased markedly everywhere but also that government redistribution has played a critical role in compensating the middle class and to a perhaps surprising degree also the poor. However, the United States is a large outlier. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does poverty influence political participation? This question has interested political scientists since the early days of the discipline, but providing a definitive answer has proved difficult. This article focuses on one central aspect of poverty—the experience of acute financial hardship, lasting a few days at a time. Drawing on classic models of political engagement and novel theoretical insights, I argue that by inducing stress, social isolation, and feelings of alienation, acute financial hardship has immediate negative effects on political participation. Inference relies on a natural experiment afforded by the sequence of bank working days that causes short-term financial difficulties for the poor. Using data from three million individuals, personal interviews, and 1,100 elections in Germany, I demonstrate that acute financial hardship reduces both turnout intentions and actual turnout. The results imply that the financial status of the poor on election day can have important consequences for their political representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent work on US policymaking argues that responsiveness to public opinion is distorted by money, in that the preferences of the rich matter much more than those of lower-income Americans. A second distortion—partisan biases in responsiveness—has been less well studied and is often ignored or downplayed in the literature on affluent influence. We are the first to evaluate, in tandem, these two potential distortions in representation. We do so using 49 Senate roll-call votes from 2001 to 2015. We find that affluent influence is overstated and itself contingent on partisanship—party trumps the purse when senators have to take sides. The poor get what they want more often from Democrats. The rich get what they want more often from Republicans, but only if Republican constituents side with the rich. Thus, partisanship induces, shapes, and constrains affluent influence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How did personal wealth and slaveownership affect the likelihood Southerners fought for the Confederate Army in the American Civil War? On the one hand, wealthy Southerners had incentives to free-ride on poorer Southerners and avoid fighting; on the other hand, wealthy Southerners were disproportionately slaveowners, and thus had more at stake in the outcome of the war. We assemble a dataset on roughly 3.9 million free citizens in the Confederacy and show that slaveowners were more likely to fight than non-slaveowners. We then exploit a randomized land lottery held in 1832 in Georgia. Households of lottery winners owned more slaves in 1850 and were more likely to have sons who fought in the Confederate Army. We conclude that slaveownership, in contrast to some other kinds of wealth, compelled Southerners to fight despite free-rider incentives because it raised their stakes in the war's outcome. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Are there mechanisms by which the advantaged can see the perspectives of the disadvantaged? If advantaged individuals have prolonged engagement with disadvantaged populations and confront issues of inequality through national service, do they see the world more through the lens of the poor? We explore this question by examining Teach For America (TFA), as TFA is a prominent national service program that integrates top college graduates into low-income communities for two years and employs a selection model that allows for causal inference. A regression discontinuity approach, utilizing an original survey of over 32,000 TFA applicants and TFA's selection data for the 2007–2015 application cycles, reveals that extended intergroup contact in a service context causes advantaged Americans to adopt beliefs that are closer to those of disadvantaged Americans. These findings have broad implications for our understanding of the impact of intergroup contact on perceptions of social justice and prejudice reduction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conventional models of clientelism often assume poor voters have little or no choice over which local broker to turn to for help. Yet communities in many clientelistic settings are marked by multiple brokers who compete for a following. Such competition makes client choices, and the preferences guiding such choices, pivotal in fueling broker support. We examine client preferences for a pervasive broker—slum leaders—in the context of urban India. To identify resident preferences for slum leaders, we conducted an ethnographically informed conjoint survey experiment with 2,199 residents across 110 slums in two Indian cities. Contra standard emphases on shared ethnicity, we find residents place heaviest weight on a broker's capability to make claims on the state. A survey of 629 slum leaders finds client-preferred traits distinguish brokers from residents. In highlighting processes of broker selection, and the client preferences that undergird them, we underscore the centrality of clients in shaping local brokerage environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Particularly in developing countries, there is a gap between written law and behavior. Comparative research emphasizes that laws go unenforced due to resource constraints or inadequate control of the bureaucracy. I instead introduce the concept of forbearance, or the intentional and revocable nonenforcement of law, and argue that politicians often withhold sanctions to maximize votes as well as rents. Drawing on tools from price theory and distributive politics, I present several methods to separate situations when politicians are unable versus unwilling to enforce the law. I demonstrate the identification strategies with original data on the enforcement of laws against street vending and squatting in urban Latin America. In contexts of inadequate social policy, politicians use forbearance to mobilize voters and signal their distributive commitments. These illustrations thus suggest the rich, and largely neglected, distributive politics behind apparent institutional weakness. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Why do poor people often vote against their material interests? This article extends the study of this global paradox to the non-Western world by considering how it manifests within India, the world's biggest democracy. Arguments derived from studies of advanced democracies (such as values voting) or of poor polities (such as patronage and ethnic appeals) fail to explain this important phenomenon. Instead, I outline a novel strategy predicated on an electoral division of labor enabling elite parties to recruit the poor while retaining the rich. Recruitment is outsourced to nonparty affiliates that provide basic services to appeal to poor communities. Such outsourcing permits the party to maintain programmatic linkages to its elite core. Empirically, I test this argument with qualitative and quantitative evidence, including a survey of more than 9,000 voters. Theoretically, I argue that this approach is best suited to elite parties with thick organizations, typically those linked to religious social movements. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The relationship between welfare benefit levels and the residential choices of the poor raises two issues for federalism in the United States. Do state benefit levels affect the residential choices of the poor? Do residential choices of the poor affect the level at which a state sets its benefit levels? Empirical studies have seldom studied the interconnection between these two issues. This research estimates simultaneously the mutual effects of welfare benefits and poverty rates while controlling for other economic and political variables. When benefit levels become high, the size of the poverty population increases. Conversely, when poverty rates become high, benefit levels are cut. The findings are consistent with the claim that state-determined benefit levels distort policy and residential choices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]