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Democratization and Redistributive Policymaking: Taxation, Social Spending and Labor Market Regulation in Brazil and the Dominican Republic

One of the longest standing notions about the policy impact of democracy is that it tends to undermine inequality by politically empowering the economically disadvantaged. Theorists as far back as Aristotle have argued that, given the chance, the poor will use the tools of democracy to pressure for policies that redistribute income downward (Lenski 1966; Meltzer and Richard 1981). Tests of this hypothesis, however, have arrived at conflicting conclusions: while some support it (Cutright 1967; Huber et al 2006) others do not (Bollen and Jackman 1985; Ross 2006). That there would be no consistent empirical relationship between regime type and redistribution is not altogether surprising if one considers the enormous range of redistributive outcomes that can readily be found among both democratic and authoritarian regimes. For every Denmark, with its generous democratic welfare state, there is a Switzerland, where elected governments have avoided extensive redistribution. The contrasts are even sharper on the authoritarian side. For every Spain, where the Franco regime stonewalled demands for redistributive reforms for decades, there is a Cuba, where the post-1959 revolutionary elite implemented such reforms on a massive scale.