Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
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Representation
FIGURE 8.7. Representation and the Self-Reproduction of Inequality
and decentralization, it occurs not because decentralization creates inequality,
but because, under specific historical, political, and institutional conditions,
inequality becomes self-sustaining through the politics of institutional choice.
Ultimately, under these conditions, decentralization operates as a transmission
mechanism linking different dimensions of inequality. In contrast, there is a
broad range of political unions in which territorial inequalities do not repro-
duce themselves into larger levels of inequality, the same range of unions in
which territorial inequalities do not get reflected into extreme levels of welfare
state fragmentation, namely those characterized by more centripetal systems of
political representation.
In conclusion, these results highlight an important and largely neglected
aspect of the politics of redistribution and inequality. I have shown how the
territorial organization of fiscal structures, and more specifically the level of
decentralization of public insurance systems (taxes and transfers), is a signifi-
cant determinant of the level of inequality.
INTERREGIONAL REDISTRIBUTION IN POLITICAL UNIONS
One of the guiding themes in this monograph has been to argue that fiscal
structures in political unions are bidimensional. That is to say, the distributive
conflicts among political actors occur over two policy dimensions, interper-
sonal (transfers of income between people through taxes and transfers) and
interregional redistribution (transfers of resources for discretionary use from
rich to poor members of the union). This distinction is not simply definitional.
As shown extensively in
Chapter 2
, depending on their relative position in
the union's geography of income, actors' preferences over the size and scope
of these tools need not overlap. Which is to say, to a large extent, these two
