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The aim of this paper is to point out the limitations of conventional approaches, articulated via political processes, in reducing income inequality. Using the panel data methods, on the sample of 21 affluent OECD countries in the period from 1980 to 2011, it is observed that the increase in labour productivity as well as preferences of voters to parties that advocate greater redistribution, contrary to common perception, not necessarily lead to reduction in income inequality. Increasing dominance of big capital in the field of technological progress changes the conventions about contribution of workers to labour productivity. The result is a weakening of workers’ bargaining power in relation to employers as well as increase in gap between labour productivity growth and real wage growth, which both lead to increase in income inequality. In comparison with the other political parties, it seems that the right-wing parties are more efficient in using voters’ support to implement their concept of the welfare state, which contributes to maintaining the high market-generated income inequality. Such situation could be explained that de jure power of the government depends on election results, whereas de facto power depends on the support of so-called globally-oriented super elites. [Projekat Ministarstva nauke Republike Srbije, br. 47010]

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Abstract: The foreign policy agendas of Ukrainian political parties participating in parliamentary elections are among the important factors of influence on Ukrainians voting in favor or against. There is a positive correlation between the preferences of Ukrainian voters and the foreign policy orientations of the political parties as expressed in their electoral platforms. Even if it is not likely that in general foreign policy plays a dominant role in the average citizen''s voting decisions, it is, nevertheless, very relevant in the context of Ukrainian politics. In this article it is demonstrated that the use of foreign policy issues is a part of the overall electoral strategy of Ukrainian political parties. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

In the literature on electoral politics, full convergence of policy platforms is usually regarded as socially optimal. The reason is that risk-averse voters prefer a sure middle-of-the-road policy to a lottery of two extremes with the same expectation. In this paper, we study the normative implications of convergence in a simple model of electoral competition, in which parties are uncertain about voters'' preferences. We show that, if political parties have incomplete information about voters'' preferences, the voters may prefer some degree of policy divergence. The intuition is that policy divergence enables voters to correct policies that are based on a wrong perception of their preferences. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]