Policy Responsiveness and Economic Inequality in a Cross-National Context

A core question in the study of representation is how public opinion affects social and political outcomes. Despite increased attention to this question in recent years, a lack of empirical research hampers the finding of clear or systematic answers, particularly answers that clarify cross-national patterns in the character of representation. This paper contributes to the literature by asking whether redistribution through tax and spend policies is responsive to citizens’ views in a broad range of advanced and emerging democracies. A second and related question is whether such policy making might be more strongly responsive to rich than to poor citizens. The paper explores these questions by linking multi-country and multi-wave survey data on attitudes towards inequality to data on redistribution and changes in income inequality in the years following the survey. Furthermore, we test whether different institutional features of a country, including its electoral system and regulation of money in politics, moderate the extent of (unequal) responsiveness to citizens’ views. The findings will have important implications for the link between public opinion and government policy, and for the relationship between economic and political inequality in both advanced and emerging democracies.