Democracy and the demand for government redistribution: A survey analysis

This article uses survey data to study the impact of democracy on the demand by poor citizens for government redistribution. Taking the well-known Meltzer-Richard theory as the point of departure, three arguments are presented as to why such a demand should be stronger in democracies than in autocracies: in democracies low-income groups are: (1) exposed to elections that can make a policy difference: (2) better informed about the income distribution; and (3) better equipped to process such information. The argument receives empirical support in a Bayesian multilevel analysis which combines 188 World Values Surveys with cross-sectional and longitudinal macro data from 80 countries.