Ideologues and Redistribution: Evidence from Democracies and Dictatorships

Governments around the globe shape their citizens’ livelihoods through their economic and social policies. Yet while researchers tend to agree that in established democracies leftist governments intervene more into markets and redistribute more than rightist governments, we know much less about how a government’s economic ideology affects state intervention and redistribution in young and non-democracies – even though they comprise most of the world’s countries and population. I therefore investigate how the ideology of heads of governments affects redistributive economic and social policies across democracies and dictatorships, and how political institutions condition this relationship. To this end, I collect data on the ideology of every head of government in 178 countries from 1945 or independence to 2017 and combine it with novel data on economic and social policies to conduct the most comprehensive global analysis of the effect of ideology on market intervention and redistribution yet. The study thereby sheds light on how much the politics in established democracies differs from young and non-democracies, and how the ideology of leaders shapes their citizens’ well-being.