Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
party organizations are correlates of centripetal representation.
18
Contingent
on the system of representation, a similar set of distributive tensions associ-
ated with economic geography lead to different fiscal structures, ultimately
explaining the variation in distributive outcomes across unions.
This interaction between economic geography and political representation
works as follows. Under centrifugal representation there is little or no salience
of national elections and virtually no cost for regional elites to challenge the
national party. Local leaders focus, almost exclusively, on the mandates of their
respective principals. The protection of unit-specific interests dominates the
political agenda. Politics becomes a conflict about the distribution of resources
among jurisdictions, and territorial interests (preferences over interregional
redistribution) outweigh class interests (preferences over the centralization of
interpersonal redistribution).
Unsurprisingly, these political and institutional circumstances facilitate the
direct impact of unequal economic conditions on the politics of institutional
choice. A heterogeneous economic geography translates into very decentral-
ized fiscal structures with a very narrow window for redistributive efforts and
inequality reproduces itself by contributing to the selection of institutional
arrangements that, in turn, will protect existing territorial inequalities. Ulti-
mately, under centrifugal representation, economic geography limits the feasi-
bility of radical alterations of the interpersonal distribution of income via public
policy, thus fostering an observable association between decentralized political
structures and inegalitarian distributive outcomes. In addition to facilitating
the decentralization of interpersonal redistribution, centrifugal representation,
for instance in the form of a malapportioned senate, also fosters the capacity to
extract interregional transfers by local strongholds. As we shall see in
Chapter
4
, the very lack of a proper set of redistributive policies in the EU illustrates
this dynamics.
Things work differently under centripetal representation. National party
elites are stronger and respond to pivotal groups of voters that cut across
regional boundaries. Accordingly, the main lines of political competition tend
to follow income groups as opposed to regions. When centripetal representation
is at its highest, outcomes depend much less on the preferences of regions and
much more on how parties target population subgroups that cut across regional
boundaries. If representation operates under plurality in a common national
circumscription, parties will target the union's median voter. If representation
works to preserve proportionality, national elites will devise a combination
of interpersonal and interregional redistribution as close as possible to the
interests of the median legislature of the winning coalition (Austen-Smith and
Banks
1988
). This combination will generate relatively large levels of overall
redistribution within the union, but this will result mostly from the territorial
incidence of centralized policies of interpersonal redistribution, and less from
18
Gibson (
2004
); Rodden (
2006
); Wibbels (2005a).
