Electoral Institutions, Credible Commitment, and Redistribution

Why is there less left government and less redistribution under majoritarian than under proportional electoral institutions? The most prominent explanation for this twin observation in the comparative political economy literature is the inability of left parties in majoritarian democracies to credibly commit to a centrist tax-and-transfer platform. This paper develops and tests the argument that the patterns of government partisanship and redistribution are instead driven by the centripetal forces of electoral competition. The theoretical part of the paper extends the canonical partisan model of majoritarian electoral institutions and redistribution (Iversen and Soskice, 2006) to allow for legislative recruitment. It shows that policy-motivated parties can commit endogenously to a centrist policy platform by recruiting a sufficient number of moderate legislators and that the winning party in majoritarian systems always credibly commits to a moderate redistributive policy. The empirical part of the paper tests implications of this logic with data on policy switches and platform choice in a set of advanced industrial democracies. It finds that as predicted by the model, post-electoral policy switches are rare and that the platforms of left parties are more responsive to adverse electoral shocks in majoritarian than in proportional democracies.