In this paper, we highlight the link between the political demand and social policy outcome while taking into account the design of the party system. The political demand is measured by individual preferences and the design of the party system is defined as the extent of party fractionalization. This is, to our knowledge, the first attempt in the literature to empirically link the political demand and the policy outcome with the help of a direct measure of preferences. Moreover, we account for an additional channel, so far neglected in the literature: The composition effect of the demand. Indeed, the heterogeneity of the demand within countries, more than the level of the demand itself, is shown to have a positive impact on welfare state generosity. This impact increases with the degree of fractionalization of the party system. We run regressions on a sample of 18 OECD countries over 23 years, carefully dealing with the issues raised by the use of time-series cross-section data.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by PSE (Ecole normale supérieure) in its series PSE Working Papers with number
2008-42.
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Marco Pagano & Paolo Volpin, 2001.
"The Political Economy of Finance,"
CSEF Working Papers
76, Centre for Studies in Economics and Finance (CSEF), University of Naples, Italy.
[Downloadable!]
Other versions:
Green, Donald P. & Kim, Soo Yeon H. & Yoon, David, 2001.
"Dirty Pool,"
International Organization,
Cambridge University Press, vol. 55(02), pages 441-468, April.
[Downloadable!]
Donald P. Green & Soo Yeon Kim & David H. Yoon, 2001.
"Dirty Pool,"
International Organization,
MIT Press, vol. 55(2), pages 441-468, June.
[Downloadable!] (restricted)