Morrow, John and Carter, Michael (2012) Left, right, left: income and political dynamics in transition economies. CEP Discussion Papers (CEPDP1111). London School of Economics and Political Science. Centre for Economic Performance, London, UK.
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Abstract
The political left turn in Latin America, which lagged its transition to liberalized market economies by a decade or more, challenges conventional economic explanations of voting behavior. While the implications of upward mobility for the political preferences of forward-looking voters have been studied, neither the upward mobility model nor conventional myopic median voter models are well equipped to explain Latin America’s political transformation. This paper generalizes the forward-looking voter model to consider a broad range of dynamic processes. When voters have full information on the nature of income dynamics in a transition economy, we show that strong support for redistributive policies will materialize rapidly if income dynamics offer few prospects of upward mobility for key sections of the electorate. In contrast, when voters have imperfect information, our model predicts a slow and politically polarizing shift toward redistributive voter preferences under these same non-concave income dynamics. Simulation using fitted income dynamics for two Latin American economies suggests that the imperfect information model better accounts for the observed shift back to the left in Latin America, and that this generalized, forward-looking voter approach may offer additional insights about political dynamics in other transition economies.
| Item Type: | Monograph (Discussion Paper) |
|---|---|
| Official URL: | https://cep.lse.ac.uk/_new/publications/discussion... |
| Additional Information: | © 2012 The Author(s) |
| Divisions: | Centre for Economic Performance |
| Subjects: | H Social Sciences > HC Economic History and Conditions J Political Science > JF Political institutions (General) |
| JEL classification: | D - Microeconomics > D3 - Distribution > D31 - Personal Income, Wealth, and Their Distributions D - Microeconomics > D7 - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making > D72 - Economic Models of Political Processes: Rent-Seeking, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior D - Microeconomics > D8 - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty > D83 - Search; Learning; Information and Knowledge; Communication; Belief P - Economic Systems > P1 - Capitalist Systems > P16 - Political Economy |
| Date Deposited: | 22 Feb 2024 12:36 |
| Last Modified: | 22 Feb 2024 12:36 |
| URI: | http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/121747 |
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