Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Political parties, games and income redistribution
- 2 Opposition effects, blackmail and u-turns under Pierre Elliot Trudeau
- 3 The arithmetics of politics under Margaret Thatcher
- 4 Right-wing ascendency, pivotal players and asymmetric power under Bob Hawke
- 5 The demise of the federal social safety net under Clinton
- 6 Conclusions
- Technical addendum
- Bibliography
- Index
Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Political parties, games and income redistribution
- 2 Opposition effects, blackmail and u-turns under Pierre Elliot Trudeau
- 3 The arithmetics of politics under Margaret Thatcher
- 4 Right-wing ascendency, pivotal players and asymmetric power under Bob Hawke
- 5 The demise of the federal social safety net under Clinton
- 6 Conclusions
- Technical addendum
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
This book began life when the political economy of income inequality in Western democracies was not a fashionable topic. Its concerns now have a perceptible timeliness. In the mid 1990s income inequality seems to be a persistent feature of many rich industrialised countries (Atkinson, Rainwater and Smeeding, 1995; Brandolini, 1998), calling for exploratory and explicative research. In view of the negative implications of inequality growth for health, crime and education (Kawachi and Kennedy, 1997; Sala-i-Martin, 1997), the search for the determinants of income inequality in liberal democracies is particularly urgent.
Perhaps the marginality of distributive concerns in scholarly work, at least until recently, rested on the relative immobility of the size distribution of income in the post-war period. This stability helped to nourish a widespread feeling that democratic countries were converging towards greater income equality. Analysts espoused the belief that universal suffrage narrowed the gap between rich and poor because ‘the equality of franchise in a democratic society creates a tendency for government action to equalize incomes by redistributing them from a few wealthy persons to many less wealthy ones’ (Downs, 1957: 198). A more equal distribution of power would eventually lead to the oblivion of poverty (Burkhart, 1997; Muller, 1988; Saint-Paul and Verdier; 1992).
From the mid 1970s, however, prospects of declining inequality trends appeared largely misguided as innumerable findings reported that the rich were getting richer and the poor relatively poorer (Gottschalk and Smeeding, 1997; Eardley et al., 1996; Hills, 1996).
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- Political Parties, Games and Redistribution , pp. 1 - 31Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2001
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