Why the poor do not expropriate the rich: an old argument in new garb

Revealed social preferences of Dutch political parties

“…This finding can be explained by political economics, and provides support to median voter theories (Romer, 1975;Roberts, 1977;Meltzer and Richard, 1981), citizen candidate models (Röell, 2012;Brett and Weymark, 2014), Director's law (Stigler, 1970), probabilistic-voting models (Persson and Tabellini, 2000;Bierbrauer and Boyer, 2016), models of withinparty conflict (Roemer, 1998(Roemer, , 1999, post-election considerations (Persson and Tabellini, 2000), and vested interests resulting in a strong status quo (Olson, 1982). As such, our paper provides a bridge between political economics and normative public finance.…”

Limits to redistribution in a democracy: a survey

“…This is demonstrated in a paper by Roemer (1998) who presents a model in which two parties compete on a two-dimensional issue space: the extent of redistribution and some noneconomic issue, say religion. There is a left-wing party representing anti-clerical poor constituents and a right-wing party in favor of pro-clerical rich agents.…”

Political regime change and cultural transmission of secularism

“…The perception that the roles of religious and moral issues should receive more attention in research on the political economy can be traced to the novel work by Roemer (1998). Roemer (1998) proposes an explanation for why the rich have not had their wealth expropriated by the poor in the history of modern democracies.…”

“…Roemer (1998) proposes an explanation for why the rich have not had their wealth expropriated by the poor in the history of modern democracies. He uses the party competition model with a multidimensional issue space in which a non-economic issue such as religion or morality is included.…”