A Note on Redistributive Politics

Fry and Winters, in a recent article in this journal, concluded that political variables are more important than socioeconomic variables in terms of redistributive policies. They based their analysis, however, on twelve political but only six socioeconomic variables. This research note re-examines these relationships, utilizing twelve political and twelve socioeconomic variables. The findings are strikingly reversed, whether one considers all twenty-four variables or the best five political and the best five socioeconomic variables. However, these findings reflect a shotgun approach, simply more and more variables added to a regression equation. To reduce and clarify the analysis, two criteria are suggested for selecting independent variables: the size of the zero-order correlations, and the degree of multicolinearity among the independent variables. When three political and three socioeconomic variables are compared using these criteria, the results are once again inconsistent with those reported by Fry and Winters.