Social polarization vs income polarization: An international comparison

This paper tackles the issues of social polarization and income polarization in several North American, European and Australian countries in the perspective of redistribution patterns. Presenting a simple theoretical framework, we argue that comparing both types of polarization can help predict the level of redistribution in those countries. We thus propose an accuracy test that consists in predicting a redistribution ordering between countries and compare it with the observed one. Only countries where social polarization ranking and income polarization ranking differ are considered. As a result, we find that our prediction is accurate for about 70% of these pairs of countries.