In recent years, concerns have been raised that democratic governments are no longer responding to majority demands for redistribution.
One part of the literature uses public opinion evidence to argue that redistributive policies are strongly biased toward the preferences of the rich, another uses macro-level data to argue that governments do not respond to rising inequality in the ways predicted by standard theories of democracy. In this paper, we use an original approach to the study of political representation to reassess these conclusions. Using household income data as input in the microsimulation model EUROMOD, we examine the distributional effects of discretionary changes to tax-and-transfer policies in all 27 European Union member states since the mid-2000s. We find no indication that the rich exert an outsize influence on tax-and-transfer policies. To the contrary, in most countries governments have implemented progressive fiscal reforms benefiting low-income groups. This raises important questions for the study of political representation in both theoretical and methodological terms.
Dr. Fabian Mushövel is a Marie Curie Fellow at the European University Institute. He is a political economist working on economic inequality, the politics of redistribution, welfare states in the knowledge economy, as well as European integration with a particular focus on EU and EMU institutions. Prior to joining EUI, Fabian was the Nicholas Barr Fellow in European Political Economy at the LSE’s European Institute, and a Max Weber Fellow at the EUI. He holds a PhD from the LSE EI, where he was part of the International Inequalities Institute’s Leverhulme Doctoral Programme and held visiting scholar positions at the Economics Department at UC Berkeley and the Government Department at Harvard University. Fabian has previously worked as a consultant for Chatham House and analyst at the Centre for Economic Performance.
Dr. Mads Andreas Elkjæris an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Copenhagen. His research examines the political and democratic consequences of economic inequality in advanced democracies. Other research interests include political representation, comparative politics, and political economy. Mads holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of Southern Denmark and has previously visited Universität Potsdam, Columbia University, and Harvard University as an ERASMUS, Graduate Visiting, and Fulbright Student. Before joining the University of Copenhagen, Mads was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Politics and International Relations and Nuffield College at the University of Oxford.
Professor Jonathan Hopkin is Professor of Comparative Politics in the Department of Government and European Institute at the London School of Economics.