Dividing the Rulers: How Majority Cycling Saves Democracy by Yuhui Li

Author:Yuhui Li
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Michigan Press

The Effects of Institutions on General Equality and the Size of Redistribution

In chapter 3, I discussed the problems of using general equality and redistribution to measure minority protection. The normative implications of such measures are highly dependent on a person’s ideological placement on the left-right dimension. However, these works are still worth discussing since their dependent variables still weakly proxy different systems’ attitudes toward disadvantaged minorities. Greater income equality in a society normally implies that less of the population is left out of the overall prosperity.

It is arguable that such equality can be overdone to the extent of hurting its objectives (Friedman 1962: 179), but at least equality implies that few segments of a society are treated tyrannically. It is also arguable that less equal societies can have rather benign governments since inequality can result from laissez-faire competition (Smith 1977 [1776] 593). However, at least we cannot exclude the possibility that the government is adopting certain redistributive measures in order to hurt minorities. In other words, governments in unequal societies are not necessarily tyrannical, but they are more suspicious.

Lijphart’s (1969, 1977, 1999) series of studies is most influential in this tradition. In testing the institutional effects of the rich-poor ratio variable from the United Nations Development Program, he finds that the equality difference between majoritarian and consensus democracies on the executive-parties dimension is significant before or after controlling development level and with or without extreme cases (Lijphart 1999: 283). The same is true when testing other variables that Lijphart deems as measuring the “kindness and gentleness” of a democracy.

Although Lijphart has defined his “consensus democracy on the executive-parties dimension” concept using a large set of variables, some of which have little to do with defection costs, it is not unrelated to my defection costs argument. This is because the cases that are considered consensual democracies by his standard almost all happen to be parliamentary systems without a unified majority party,9 while the cases that are included in majoritarian democracies all happen to be countries that either tend to have a strong majority party or have a non-figurehead presidency. Therefore, such a typology happens to be consistent with the defection Page 79 →costs typology introduced in chapter 3. At least based on Lijphart’s sample, countries with lower defection costs tend to have more equal wealth distributions.

Although they approach it from a different angle, Persson and Tabellini (2003: 163) essentially confirm the same finding. The dependent variables they use are various measures of the size of government. Such a measure, of course, is even more normatively controversial than economic equality because its connection with equality is purely based on progressive redistribution, which I have shown lacks clear normative consensus. But if we add a stronger normative assumption, which Lijphart (1999) implies, that minorities should be taken care of by the welfare state, then the size of government may actually imply a better government attitude toward minorities.

What Persson and Tabellini (2003: 163) find is that both proportionality and parliamentarism have a significant effect on increasing government size.

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