Party Democratization and Fiscal Redistribution

Abstract

We demonstrate that variation in the selectorate of party leaders influences whether governments are motivated to spend more on particularistic vs. programmatic goods. When leaders are elected by a broad segment of the party, such as in a one-man-one-vote primary, they will privilege expenditures on public goods that expand the party's appeal nationally. However, if leaders are responsible to their backbenchers, e.g. selected in a parliamentary vote, then they will accede to their legislators’ demands for more geographically targeted redistribution. We test these hypotheses using an original dataset of party organization, covering over 120 political parties in seventeen advanced-industrialized democracies between 1950 and 2005. We find that where the leaders of governing parties are selected by other backbenchers, the budget share of capital expenditures increases, while that of social security transfers decreases. These results hold even when controlling for a wide variety of economic and institutional variables, such as electoral system and government composition.