Ben W. Ansell

Inequality and Democratization: A Contractarian Approach

Scholars continue to grapple with the question of the relationship between economic development and democratization; prominent recent research has focused on the effects of economic inequality. Boix suggests that democratization is likelier when inequality is low, whereas Acemoglu and Robinson argue that democratization is likelier when inequality is at middling levels. Both assume that democratization is a function of autocratic elites’ fear of the extent to which a future median voter would redistribute under different levels of inequality. Drawing on contractarian political theory, the authors suggest that democratization is instead a function of demands by rising economic groups for protection from the state. This alternative approach suggests that land and income inequality affect democratization differently: Autocracies with equal land distribution are indeed more likely to democratize, but contrary to the conventional wisdom, income inequality is more likely to promote democratization.

University Challenges: Explaining Institutional Change in Higher Education

Higher education policy has been subject to considerable reform in OECD states over the past two decades. Some states have introduced tuition fees, others have massively increased public funding for higher education, and still others remain in stasis, retaining the elitist model with which they began the postwar era. This article develops the argument that higher education policy in the OECD is driven by a set of partisan choices within a trilemma between the level of enrollment, the degree of subsidization, and the overall public cost of higher education. The author develops a formal model of the micromechanisms underlying movements within this trilemma, noting the importance of partisan politics, existing enrollment, tax structure, and access. These propositions are tested statistically on a sample of twenty-two OECD countries and through case histories of higher education reform in England, Sweden, and Germany.

Preferences in Context Micro Preferences, Macro Contexts, and the Demand for Social Policy

Political economists have increasingly looked to understand social welfare policy as a product of individual-level demand for social spending. This work hypothesizes that individuals with riskier jobs demand more social spending and that large welfare states emerge where there are more of such individuals. In this article we build on the “policy feedback” literature to argue that existing welfare institutions condition how individual-level factors affect social policy preferences. Specifically, we argue that institutions directly altering the risk of unemployment (employment protection legislation) and those that delink benefits from the labor market create a more uniform system of social risk that reduces the importance of individual-level risk in shaping policy preferences. We test these propositions using multilevel analysis of 19 advanced industrial countries in 2006. We find that individual risk matters for social policy preferences only where employment protection is low and welfare benefits are dependent on employment.

The Political Economy of Ownership: Housing Markets and the Welfare State

The major economic story of the last decade has been the surge and collapse of house prices worldwide. Yet political economists have had little to say about how this critical phenomenon affects citizens’ welfare and their demands from government. This article develops a novel theoretical argument linking housing prices to social policy preferences and policy outcomes. I argue that homeowners experiencing house price appreciation will become less supportive of redistribution and social insurance policies since increased house prices both increase individuals’ permanent income and the value of housing as self-supplied insurance against income loss. Political parties of the right will, responding to these preferences, cut social spending substantially during housing booms. I test these propositions using both microdata on social preferences from panel surveys in the USA, the UK, and a cross-country survey of 29 countries, and macrodata of national social spending for 18 countries between 1975 and 2001.

The Political Origins of Primary Education Systems: Ideology, Institutions, and Interdenominational Conflict in an Age of Nation-Building

This paper is concerned with the development of national primary education regimes in Europe, North America, Latin America, Oceania, and Japan between 1870 and 1939. We examine why school systems varied between countries and over time, concentrating on three institutional dimensions: centralization, secularization, and subsidization. There were two paths to centralization: through liberal and social democratic governments in democracies, or through fascist and conservative parties in autocracies. We find that the secularization of public school systems can be explained by path-dependent state-church relationships (countries with established national churches were less likely to have secularized education systems) but also by partisan politics. Finally, we find that the provision of public funding to private providers of education, especially to private religious schools, can be seen as a solution to religious conflict, since such institutions were most common in countries where Catholicism was a significant but not entirely dominant religion.

Journal Editors and “Results-Free” Research A Cautionary Note

Should journals review submissions based only on the research question and research design, independent of whether the results are statistically and substantively significant? This special issue is the first effort in political science (and perhaps across the social sciences) to publish articles based on submission of research designs alone. We offer our thoughts on the process.

Taking Credit: Redistribution and Borrowing in an Age of Economic Polarization

Several recent studies link rising income inequality in the United States to the global financial crisis, arguing that US politicians did not respond to growing inequality with fiscal redistribution. Instead, Americans saved less and borrowed more to maintain relative consumption in the face of widening economic disparities. This article proposes a theory in which fiscal redistribution dampens the willingness of citizens to borrow to fund current consumption. A key implication is that pretax inequality will be more tightly linked with credit in less redistributive countries. The long-run partisan composition of government is, in turn, a key determinant of redistributive effort. Examining a panel of eighteen OECD democracies, the authors find that countries with limited histories of left-wing participation in government are significantly more likely see credit expansion as prefisc inequality grows compared to those in which the political left has been more influential.

Wealth Inequality Beyond Piketty

Thomas Piketty’s 2014 magnum opus argued that the holders of capital would receive an ever-rising share of national income over the twenty-first century. While this book has attracted unprecedented interest across the social sciences, we know rather little about the politics of wealth inequality, as opposed to income inequality, and hence how growth in wealth inequality, per Piketty, might have political impacts over the coming decades both within and across countries. A further twist to Piketty’s argument is that most of the rise in the return to capital actually comes from residential housing not investment capital. Are homeowners the new capitalists? What are the implications in terms of political divides, particularly between young and old, and those living in prime vs peripheral residential locations? This essay draws on evidence from cross-OECD and Eastern European survey data, along with British data from the BSAS and the Brexit vote, to argue for the importance of new sources of wealth, particularly housing, in defining contemporary political conflicts.

Inequality and Democratization: Assessing the Relationship between Inequality and Democratization

INTRODUCTION This chapter tests our elite-competition argument connecting inequality to regime change. We find strong support for our conjecture that income inequality is positively, while land inequality is negatively, associated with transitions from autocracy. We develop these findings using two sources of data on income inequality – one covering 1820–1992 and another, with broader country-coverage, covering 1955–2004 – as well as a variety of measures of democracy. The countervailing effects of land and income inequality on regime transitions show up across historical periods and differing measures of democracy and inequality, and are robust to a range of estimation techniques and sensitivity tests. This chapter is organized as follows. Section 5.2 briefly summarizes existing empirical research. Since our datasets have different country- and time-period coverage, Section 5.3 then operationalizes our independent and dependent variables and discusses estimation techniques. Section 5.4 contains our empirical tests, and Section 5.5 the conclusion. QUANTITATIVE RESEARCH ON INEQUALITY AND REGIME CHANGE An enormous literature has explored the relationship between per capita income, inequality and democracy. One might say that quantitative analysis began with Lipset, given his hypothesis that democratization was only likely where a sizable middle class had emerged. As Rueschemeyer, Stephens, and Stephens (1992) noted, this hypothesis is not precisely about the level of wealth, but about the distributional consequences of economic growth. Most quantitative research, however, has focused on the link between democracy and development per se, partly because of ambiguity in Lipsets argument and partly because no cross-national income inequality data existed until relatively recently. Early efforts to examine the impact of inequality were, thus, hampered by fragmentary data. All the while, scholars continued to explore the impact of growth per se. Przeworski et al. (2000) prominently suggested that no relationship existed between development and democratization – and also dismissed the idea that inequality and democratization were causally related. Their claim that regime change is exogenous to underlying social forces raised a number of methodological and theoretical questions, and sparked renewed interest in the debate.

Inequality and Democratization: Empirical Extensions

INTRODUCTION In this chapter, we explore additional empirical implications of our theoretical model. Our model suggests that income inequality should be a better predictor of bourgeois-led transitions to “partial” rather than “full” democracy, whereas land inequality should retard both types of regime transitions. We examine this question empirically by considering additional ways to operationalize democracy using the Polity index, and a variety of new empirical techniques to address this question. We then consider how different paths of economic development might shape which forms of inequality matter most politically. Our formal model predicts that income inequality should hasten transitions to democracy where an emerging (industrial) sector is growing rapidly compared to a stagnant (agricultural) sector. Conversely, rural inequality should matter more when the agricultural sector is relatively larger than the industrial sector. Using the level of economic development to indicate the relative size of the industrial sector, we find support for this conjecture. Finally, we consider the impact of asset mobility. Our model suggested that asset mobility has an ambiguous theoretical impact on regime change, because although it decreases the bourgeoisies incentives to rebel it also increases the elites incentives to grant democracy. Using a countrys capital share of income to measure asset-mobility, we find weak support for the latter hypothesis. However, introducing this variable does not change the predicted impact of income or land inequality. VARIETIES OF REGIMES Here we explore our models implication that inequality better predicts transitions to partial rather than full democracy. We do so in three steps. First, we examine the extent to which our argument can empirically distinguish transitions from autocracy to partial and/or full democracy by splitting political regimes into these three types and using Markov switching models. Second, we examine the effects of inequality across all possible thresholds along the Polity index, expecting weaker results as one approaches transitions across “most democratic” scores. Results using both approaches confirm our hypothesis that land and income inequality better predict transitions to partial democracy. Finally, we examine the impact of different forms of inequality on changes in different institutional elements of democracy, by breaking the Polity index into its components of executive recruitment, constraints on the executive, and political competition.