Research

We re-analyze four major explanations of redistribution including the Meltzer-Richard model, power resources theory, Iversen-Soskice’s political institutions explanation, and Lupu and Ponstusson’s skewness theory. For each of these, we reconsider the causal chain and test their assumptions using a comprehensive, original dataset on working-age income-inequality consisting of 589 country-years for affluent democracies in the period 1963-2019. We find that partisan governments are directly related to redistribution and have a strong effect on the generosity of social policy. Lupu and Pontusson’s skew measure has no effect on redistribution in models with controls but does have a positive effect on generosity of social policy. Finally, we find that the mean-to median income ratio has a consistent, negative, and highly significant effect on redistribution, directly refuting the very premise of the Meltzer-Richard model. 

Can privatization depoliticize former areas of state intervention? Experimental evidence suggests that market reforms are especially resilient to policy reversals due to their ability to shape individuals’ perceptions of incumbents (SoRelle 2022, Machtei n.d.). Absent of a corresponding change to the properties of the service or the information environment, such a dynamic would imply that market reforms alter the issue frame used for evaluating candidates (Chong and Druckman, 2007; Druckman, 2004). That is, reduced accountability following domestic liberalization may be a function of reforms removing policy domains from the dominant political discourse and framing their respective services or goods as market choices. Using subnational data from the United Kingdom’s 'Right to Buy' reform, I show that privatizing government assets (in this case, public housing) has a depoliticizing effects which can make such reforms particularly resilient to reasserting state intervention.

Can privatization and de-regulation interfere with electoral accountability? The expansion of markets at the expense of government management and regulation since the 1980s has often been framed by policy makers as a means for improving social welfare. Yet, even when reforms yield unsatisfactory outcomes, policy reversals via de-liberalizing reforms remain exceedingly rare. In this paper, I suggest that this dynamic is partially explained by the framing effects of liberalization. By submerging the state, policy outcomes become synonymized primarily with the behavior of market actors rather than the political sphere. Put differently, liberalization qualifies our expectations from government and thereby improves perceptions of incumbent performance. To test whether liberalization reduces electoral accountability, I leveraged data from an original survey experiment in which respondents were asked to assess the performance of incumbent politicians in light of a service area of declining quality. The results indicate that privatization improved general satisfaction with incumbents, as well as their perceived electoral fortunes. The same cannot be said with respect to deregulation which is a more implicit form of economic liberalization. These findings imply that certain liberalization reforms pose a unique risk for creating a democratic deficit since they make unfavorable outcomes less susceptible to public demands. Moreover, this study demonstrates the potential for incumbents to strategically leverage liberalization reforms in order to minimize their exposure to disadvantageous policy domains. In the next two sections, I develop a theory of liberalization and accountability, and then explained the experimental design and sample. After presenting the main results, the paper reflects on the future of democratic accountability at the age of liberalization.

Fragmented citizenship has been a concept describing a deficit in the rights granted to citizens, which may be subject to fluctuations. This paper suggests that the expansion of citizenship is connected to an ideational shift while fragmentation occurs when institutional structures and core values inhibit change in certain areas. The case under discussion is the status of homosexuals in Israel. The country has been described as a gay-friendly society where homosexuals enjoy a plethora of socio-economic rights on the one hand, but are denied marital rights on the other. Expansion of citizenship was made possible owing to a gradual process of liberalization and growing institutional receptivity. This however, did not conclude with the full social inclusion of Israeli homosexuals but rather with citizenship fragmentation. Granting full citizenship rights would have been incompatible with Jewish national core values backed by the institutional autonomy utilized by resistant veto actors.

In this chapter, we embed radical right parties-an increasingly prominent force in European party systems-within power resource theory (PRT). We argue that these parties shape welfare outcomes through two channels: directly, through the policies they help enact from cabinet or from pivotal positions in the legislature, and indirectly, by altering the strategies of mainstream parties, whose responses vary across party families. Because the radical right combines support for social protection with nativist boundary-making, we expect its influence to pull decommodification, stratification, and redistribution in different directions. Replicating and extending recent PRT models, we find that radical right legislative strength is associated with higher redistribution but only weakly with benefit generosity, and that these associations are conditioned by the historical legacy of left and right incumbency. By embedding this new party family within the framework developed by Huber and Stephens, we update PRT for the post-industrial era.

The rise of populism as an electorally viable political force has upended many seemingly settled aspects of political and social life. In this paper, we examine the effect of right-wing populist parties on mature, postindustrial welfare states. We argue that largely owing to their support among nativist working-class voters, right-wing populists appear to have a more egalitarian impact on redistribution compared to their mainstream counterparts on the right. However, unlike the traditional left, this dynamic is infused with strong inegalitarian tendencies. We further argue that understanding populists' policy impact requires examining their ability to reshape the behavior of mainstream parties. Finally, we ground both our theoretical and empirical approach within power resource theory, thereby extending this influential framework to the contemporary age of populist ascendancy.

Public transit policies have grown increasingly salient in recent decades. Despite evidence suggesting past transit development projects carried important distributive legacies in cities (Cheape 1980; Divall & Bond 2017) and influence inequalities, public transit has been largely left out of poverty and inequality literature. In this paper, we thereby argue that public transit should be understood as a form of social policy and a part of the ‘broader’ welfare state. We define public transit as mass transit focused on travel within a metropolitan area, “with the ability to carry multiple passengers who may have different origins, destinations, and purposes” (Walker 2024: 13; see also Wong et al. 2020). We thus suggest that public transit policies have the potential to influence distributive consequences for various reasons. They directly affect labor market integration, can alleviate or reinforce class and racial hierarchies, and influence the elasticity of housing demand and property values. To demonstrate the distributive significance of transit systems, we examine their relation to market income poverty, assembling an original dataset on transit systems across 15 metropolitan areas in Europe and Australia. We argue that the significant economic externalities of metropolitan transit systems may far exceed internal efficiency, which could result in an undersupply of mass transit in highly privatized transit systems with weak government oversight. Specifically, insufficient service to low-income areas could weaken access to labor markets, while more encompassing public regulation and system integration may improve mobility and reduce poverty. 

Do private education markets exacerbate educational inequalities? Private markets are expected to increase efficiency through market competition. However, there is reason to suspect that certain privatized social services will fail to attract sufficient competition to improve their desired social outcome. After evaluating the political ramification of privatization and controlling for policy outcomes in the previous chapters, I now turn to examine the latter. In particular, I focus on private education markets which have been one of the most noteworthy and polemic forms of welfare privatization. The literature on private education often examines personal performance, relies on varying empirical frames and consequentially, provides contradictory insights. Given the rising correlation between skill and income in the postindustrial era, the main objective of this project is to evaluate the efficacy of education delivery strategies through a distributive lens. Rather than treating privatization as a binary, I suggest that education outcomes are determined by the legal framework provided by the state and by the nature of competitions as determined by market actors. To test my hypotheses, I leverage school and individual level data and conducted field work to examine the distinct private education markets of Chile and Norway.

How does social mobility affect support for inclusive policies? This article argues that people who experienced upward (downward) mobility have stronger (weaker) beliefs in meritocracy and, in turn, be less (more) supportive of targeted egalitarian policies. Individuals who ascend to a higher social status that surpasses their parental background will be more inclined to embrace conservative or right leaning values, which aligns with increasing their likelihood of espousing a meritocratic worldview. Moreover, people who believe in meritocracy tend to underestimate the role of external assistance to mitigate inequalities. Thus, we expect people who experienced upward mobility to attribute the responsibility for social inequities to the personal or cultural failings of underprivilege groups and as result, to oppose affirmative action. We test this argument using a novel framework to trace the causal path with an original survey conducted in the United States and an experimental survey in Chile.