The Consequences of Government Ideology and Taxation on Welfare Voting

• Published date: 01 September 2016
• Author: Jungsub Shin
• Date: 01 September 2016
• DOI: 10.1177/1065912916648014
• Subject Matter: Articles

Political Research Quarterly

2016, Vol. 69(3) 430 –443

© 2016 University of Utah

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DOI: 10.1177/1065912916648014

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Article

Introduction

Since the Second World War, welfare spending has grown

considerably and is currently a core component of gov-

ernment expenditure in most advanced countries.

Although several studies (Brown 1988; Marklund 1988;

Schwartz 1994) anticipated the inevitability of retrench-

ment due to the dominance of neo-liberal ideas, market

globalization, and fear of government’s fiscal deficit and

debts, high levels of welfare spending have continued in

Western European countries (Castles 2004; Iversen 2001;

Swank 2002) and OECD countries (Kautto et al. 2001;

Lindbom 2001; Stephens 1996). Average welfare spend-

ing levels in most advanced industrial democracies are

now between 20 and 28 percent of GDP (Organization for

Economic Co-operation and Development, 2009). Why

do governments implement expansionary welfare spend-

ing policy in an era of “permanent austerity”? (Pierson

2001)

This study provides an empirical and theoretical

explanation for this phenomenon. In the literatures of

political economy, it is widely believed that the greater

the government spending on welfare, the better the

rewards for incumbents (Cox and McCubbins 1986; Dixit

and Londregan 1996; Hibbs 1977; Lindbeck and Weibull

1987; Nordhaus 1975). However, the effect of welfare

spending on incumbents’ electoral fate has drawn little

attention from the scholars of comparative politics. The

extant studies focus mainly on a specific national context,

such as the United States (Feldman and Jondrow 1984;

Levitt and Snyder 1997; Orriols 2010; Peltzman 1992;

Stein and Bickers 1994), and their empirical results are

mixed. In terms of cross-national perspective, few studies

have examined this relationship. Schumacher, Vis, and

van Kersbergen (2013) showed that parties that have a

positive welfare image, such as the Social Democratic

and Christian Democratic Party families, lost votes for

welfare retrenchment policies. In contrast, Armingeon

and Giger (2008) found no significant relationship

between the retrenchment policy and incumbents’ elec-

toral outcomes. Also, Giger and Nelson (2010) found that

incumbent parties did not lose votes by retrenchment, but

rather that some parties (liberal and religious parties)

even gain votes when they reduced welfare benefits.

These three studies have focused on the effects of

retrenchment in specific welfare programs on political

648014PRQXXX10.1177/1065912916648014Political Research QuarterlyShin

research-article2016

1Hanyang University, Seoul, South Korea

Corresponding Author:

Jungsub Shin, Institute for Euro-African Studies, Hanyang University,

511 Social Science Building, Seoul 04763, South Korea.

Email: jsshin.polisci@gmail.com

The Consequences of Government

Ideology and Taxation on Welfare Voting

Jungsub Shin1

Abstract

Welfare spending has grown considerably and is currently a core component of government expenditure in most

advanced countries. Although a good deal of scholarship assumes that benefiting from welfare spending increases the

likelihood of voting for the incumbent parties, the impact of general welfare spending on incumbent parties’ electoral

success has received scant attention. Moreover, we do not have much evidence regarding the conditions under which

citizens reward incumbent parties for their generous welfare spending. This article expects that an increase in welfare

spending has a positive effect on incumbent vote, but this effect is conditional on the ideology of government and

levels of taxation. By examining 197 lower chamber elections in thirty-one OECD countries from approximately 1980

to 2013, this article finds that incumbent parties gain benefits for expansionary welfare spending. However, as the

ideology of government moves closer to the right and as levels of taxation increase, the effects of welfare spending on

incumbent parties’ vote share become weaker. The conditional effects of government ideology and levels of taxation

on welfare voting suggest that right-wing governments can be relatively free from their welfare performance and that

high levels of taxation reduce the electoral benefits of generous welfare spending.

Keywords

welfare state, taxation, government ideology, retrospective voting