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This paper examines the influence of ethnic heterogeneity on preferences for redistribution of income. I find that ethnic heterogeneity does not always influence support for or against redistribution, even when large income differences may exist between ethnic groups. Instead, support for redistribution only become a function of ethnic heterogeneity when there are incentives for parties to link the issue of redistribution with social identity. These incentives are more likely to arise when parties link programmatically with the electorate over the issue of redistribution. In order to remain electorally viable in a programmatic environment, right-wing parties must link redistribution with ethnic identities in order to prevent citizens from voting solely on the basis of individual pocketbook concerns. I find that it is generally in countries with highly programmatic linkages over redistribution that ethnic identity has predicts attitudes for redistribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, there has been an increased interest in theorizing and empirical research concerning democratic accountability mechanisms such as programmatic appeals and clientelism, but a relative lack of readily comparable cross-national data. This paper addresses this empirical gap by first developing party and system-level indices of programmatic structuration based on a new global expert survey encompassing 88 polities. These indices are based on the cohesion, polarization and salience of positions taken by parties on different issues in each country. Second, the programmatic measures developed are subjected to various tests of construct validity through comparing the relationship with alternative programmatic measures from the survey, as well as exploring their relationship with economic development. Finally, the paper compares politicians' efforts to project programmatic appeals with other appeals politicians may deploy to attract voters and establish relations of accountability, and suggests future avenues for the refinement of these measures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political parties combine and use different linkage strategies in order to achieve electoral success. In this paper, we examine the endogenous and exogenous factors that influence which democratic linkage strategies parties will choose to emphasize. In so doing, we challenge an often implicit assumption that parties will use one mode of democratic accountability at the expense of other modes, and show that parties will often use a variety of different linkage mechanisms. With a new dataset on democratic accountability developed by a research team based at Duke University, we use cluster analysis to show some of the combinations of accountability mechanisms typically used by parties, and highlight the systemic and party-level factors which result in the linkage patterns observed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Redistribution implies a transfer from the rich to the poor. Despite the large amount of theoretical work on the politics of redistribution, we have a very imperfect notion of how much redistribution actually takes place in advanced industrial societies. The conceptualization and construction of measures of redistribution have lagged theoretical developments. Commonly used measures of redistribution, such as the relative and absolute gini difference, do not accurately capture the amount of wealth that poorer individuals receive as a result of redistribution. Since taxation and benefits may affect certain segments of the population more than others, the ranking of individuals by income may not be the same pre and post taxes and transfers. This problem of reordering hides the amount of income the poor receive as a result of redistributive conflicts, limiting our understanding of the political conflicts themselves. To overcome this problem, I build off measures of tax progressivity, which do not suffer from problems of reordering of individuals, to develop a new measure that more accurately captures the concept of redistribution. Using LIS data, I apply this new measure of redistribution and show how it relates to other measures. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]