Abstract
Are democracies better at delivering material benefits to the poor? What would be a key mechanism to translate social demands for redistribution to more egalitarian outcomes in the developing world? Analyzing an unbalanced pooled time-series dataset for domestic government spending, welfare state generosity, and income inequality in the developing world from 1971 to 2008, we find that (partial) democracies promote higher levels of domestic government spending, but they are not associated with higher levels of welfare state generosity. Our results also indicate that in developing countries, welfare state generosity is related to more equality. However, domestic government spending does not have any significant impact on income inequality even in democracies.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
Supplementary Material
Please find the following supplemental material available below.
For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.
For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.
