How does a growing wealth gap affect voting? – Evidence from Sweden

Abstract

This paper studies the relationship between the growing wealth gap and voter behavior. The patrimonial voting literature suggests that wealth in itself leads to more right-wing voting, but we argue that previous research has overlooked the relative aspect of wealth. Drawing on classical models of political economy we hypothesize that voters who fall behind others should demand more redistribution and therefore vote for Left wing parties. We find robust support for this using wealth data from Swedish electoral precincts between 1998 and 2006. Additional analyses suggest that it is mainly relative house wealth that relates to voting, and not other wealth types. This supports an argument that visibility is important for the effect of relative resources. We also find that the results appear to be driven by right-wing voters moving to the left rather than increased turnout.