When the Median Legislator Matters: Redistribution and the Investiture Vote

One of the policies parties are most interested in influencing is income redistribution. The conflict over redistribution is quintessential to the left-right dimension of political competition. Following the logic of a partisan model of politics, there are good reasons to believe that redistribution policy will somehow respond to changes in the distribution of parties' resources and access to policy-making. Yet the question remains whether changes in this policy, holding structural factors constant, are a result of changes in the composition of governments or, rather, it is what occurs in parliament what explains the dynamics of redistribution. There is obviously a correlation between the partisanship of governments and parliaments, yet the fact that the overlap is not perfect others an interesting and exploitable variation. We claim that, in general, parliamentary partisanship (i.e. the distribution of parties' preferences on redistribution and bargaining power) will be a better predictor of the dynamics of redistribution than government partisanship. Empirically, we find that the distance between parliamentary and governmental partisanship contributes to explain the remaining variation of redistribution that the latter is unable to explain. Additionally, we find that this effect is conditional on other institutional characteristics such as the particular form of parliamentarism. More concretely, in those parliamentary democracies where an explicit investiture vote at the beginning of the term is needed, the preferences and power of the parties represented in parliament influence redistribution more than where governments do not need to face the investiture debate (where redistribution dynamics more closely respond to changes in government).