Abstract
Many have attributed the recent unprecedented wave of redistribution in Brazil to national economic and political factors such as the commodities boom, changes in minimum wages or premiums to skilled labor, the rise of the Partido dos Trabalhadores and President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and a commodities-driven economic boom. Yet much less attention has been devoted to the study of inequality at the subnational level, where trajectories of inequality across states remain incredibly varied. This article argues that Brazil’s most recent democratic transition enhanced political competition in many Brazilian states, which in turn has contributed to the amelioration of inequality. Using an original time-series cross-sectional dataset covering the highly redistributive period of 1998–2015, this article finds that Brazilian states with higher political and party competition have lower levels of inequality than those with less competitive party systems.
Highlights
Despite remaining one of the world’s most unequal countries, Brazil has experienced an unprecedented wave of income redistribution in the twenty-first century
I employ an alternative measure of party system competition— the vote share of the first-place or winning party—that does not rely on margins between two particular parties, in robustness checks provided in the appendix
One may contend that it is possible that the relationship between party system competition and inequality is operating in the opposite causal direction, that is, inequality may be shaping dynamics of competition across party systems
Summary
Many have attributed the recent unprecedented wave of redistribution in Brazil to national economic and political factors such as the commodities boom, changes in minimum wages or premiums to skilled labor, the rise of the Partido dos Trabalhadores and President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and a commodities-driven economic boom. Using an original time-series cross-sectional dataset covering the highly redistributive period of 1998–2015, this article finds that Brazilian states with higher political and party competition have lower levels of inequality than those with less competitive party systems. Substantial drops in income inequality prompted literature focusing on national level dynamics such as the commodities boom, changes in minimum wages or premiums to skilled labor, the rise of the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT) and President Inácio Lula da Silva, and heralded social programs such as Bolsa Família. This article contributes to the literature by continuing to develop and test causal mechanisms of subnational political competition and social policy making, and placing these theories into the domain of economic inequality
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