Multiple Dimensions And Coalitional Politics
Building on the majestic work of Moore (1971), Esping-Andersen instead suggests that the answer lies in historically unique class coalitions. Red-green coalitions in Scandinavia forced socialist parties (which lacked stable majorities) to accept universalism. State-corporatist coalitions in continental Europe were forged by autocrats like Bismarck to stem the rise of the labormovement. In countries such as Britain and the USA, where the state and the left were both relatively weak, social issues were essentially dealt with through an extension of the old poor laws, allying the middle class with higher income groups. Echoing the recent literature on path dependence (Pierson 2000), Esping- Andersen then suggests that the structure of the benefit system re-produces the political support for each type. But neither the origins of the three worlds, nor their stability, can be said to be explained since there is no argument to preclude alternative outcomes. For example, why would it not be possible for liberal welfare states to expand redistribution towards the middle class? Or why does the middle class not try to exclude the poor from sharing in the generous benefits of the social democratic model? Or why can outsiders not offer a deal to a subset of insiders in the conservative model that would cause the coalition to break up?Without any explicit theory, much of Esping-Andersen’s analysis comes across as post hoc description. One could make a similar charge against Lowi’s (1964) account of public policymaking. Like Esping-Andersen’s work, however, it provides a convincing account of the numerous forms that distributive politics can take. Specifically, Lowi distinguishes between distributive, regulatory, and redistributive politics.
Distributive politics refers to a situation where narrowly defined groups or constituencies, such as congressional districts, seek to maximize their share of appropriations. Since most of the cost can be externalized, everyone pushes for more spending and no one has a sufficiently strong incentive to prevent others from doing the same: “I agree to spend on your project if you agree to spend onmine.” The result iswhat Olson terms “distributive coalitions,” characterized by excessive and wasteful spending. Unlike the quiet, behind-the-scenes logrolling of distributive politics, regulatory politics pits losers against winners as some are advantaged and others disadvantaged by public policies (public procurement decisions, licensing, and other regulatory decisions). Redistributive politics of the Meltzer–Richard variety is also contentious, but the divisions are now across class instead of sector. In a sense, therefore, the nature of public policy (distributive, regulatory, or redistributive) can be predicted by the policy area. Yet, it is hard to see how “policy area” can be treated as a truly exogenous variable any more than the benefit structure in Esping-Andersen’s story can. Sure, we know that the New Deal involved class politics and major redistribution, and it clearly contrasts to Lowi’s other types, but to move beyond post hoc description needs a theory of why distributive politics takes on particular forms at particular times. Dixit and Londregan’s (1996, 1998) model of transfer spending takes us one step in this direction.
Assuming probabilistic voting, if two parties do not know individual voter preferences but do know the distribution of such preferences by groups, and if loyalty to different parties varies across groups, vote-maximizing parties will concentrate transfers on the groups with the most “swing” voters. The principle is to distribute transfers so that the marginal vote gain for each dollar spent is exactly the same across all groups. Not surprisingly, groups that have a lot of swing votes will be advantaged because the returns (in terms of votes) of investing in these groups are higher than in other groups. With the additional assumption that loyalists are concentrated among the rich and the poor (those with “extreme” preferences), the implication is that middle class will receive most of the transfers 9—a result that is known as “Director’s Law”. An assumption that is not explained is why parties cannot compete for the loyalty of ideologically committed voters. For example, if African-Americans are loyal to the Democrats because of the party’s position on affirmative action (or for any other reason for that matter), then there is no reason Republicans cannot appeal to these voters by adopting a more pro-affirmative action platform. Yet, if loyalty is endogenous to party strategies we are right back into strange world of multidimensional politics without a core.
The same is true if we drop the two-party assumption since the “divide the pie” game then does not predict any stable coalition. What is lost by adopting restrictive model assumptions is therefore the ability to consider more complex patterns of coalition formation, and that limits the usefulness of the model for comparative purposes. Modeling multidimensional coalitional politics is at the center of several new attempts to understand distribution in democracies. In Roemer’s (1997, 2001) model, people have intrinsic preferences on some ascriptive dimension such as race or religion, in addition to preferences over redistribution. If the redistributive dimension was the only one that mattered, the analysis would essentially collapse to a Meltzer– Richard model. When a second dimension is introduced, however, the right party can appeal to poor religious or racist voters, and the left party is forced to respond by attracting more wealthy anticlerical or anti-racist voters. As this “exchange” of voters takes place, the two constituencies will tend to become more similar in terms of income.
The original pro-welfare coalition is thus broken apart by appeals to commonalities on another, non-economic, dimension. As Riker (1986) recognized informally many years ago, the (re-)bundling of issues is a critical component of coalitional politics, and it helps explain why the poor often don’t soak the rich.10 Alesina and Glaeser (2004) make a related argument for why racial politics may undermine redistribution. If people feel altruistic only towards people of their own race, they will not redistribute to a minority that constitutes a disproportionate share of the poor. Of course, if solidarity with the poor is a “taste” then we need a theory of why people acquire this taste, and Alesina and Glaeser go on to argue that elites that oppose redistribution can use the “race card” to undermine support for redistribution. This is similar to the logic in Roemer’s model. Austen-Smith and Wallerstein (2003) provide a quite different story about the importance of race. In their model people have “race-blind” preferences and are simply trying to maximize their net income.
Yet the mere existence of a second dimension (here affirmative action) can cause a legislative coalition in favor of redistribution to break up. The reason (loosely speaking) is that the rich in the majority can offer a bargain to the minority that strengthens affirmative action but reduces redistribution to the poor. Of course, other coalitions are also feasible, but none that generate as much redistribution as bargaining over a single redistributive policy would. The Roemer and Austen-Smith models are both very complex, but they suggest that countries with a higher dimensionality of the policy space also tend to have less redistribution. Przeworski and Sprague (1986) proposed a similar idea when they argued that left policies would become less prominent as party competition became more influenced by non-economic issues. Yet, tomy knowledge no systematic comparative test of the effect of multidimensionality on redistribution has been carried out. Alesina and Glaeser present cross-national correlations between spending and racial, ethnic, and religious heterogeneity, but this is an area ripe for empirical research..
