Democracy, Redistribution, and Inequality: Evidence from the English Poor Law

This paper tests whether inequality shapes the redistributive impact of democratization by examining changes to the governance of councils providing poor relief — rudimentary social insurance — in nineteenth-century Britain. An 1894 reform removed institutional features — a graduated franchise, property qualifications, the absence of a secret ballot, and the participation of unelected magistrates — that allowed landowners to control spending on poor relief after the 1832 Great Reform Act. The empirical analysis uses a new annual dataset of poor law spending from 1884-1905 to test whether higher pre-reform inequality amplified the effect of democratic reform on redistribution. The results support the Meltzer-Richard hypothesis: higher local income inequality led to higher poor relief spending after 1894. Areas where landed elites held political power saw smaller increases in expenditure, indicating that de facto elite influence muted the effect of democratization. These findings provide empirical support for models of democratization that focus on demands for redistribution.