 Thank you everybody for for being here. Thanks to Anna Maria and the IDB for organizing the the panel as well So I'm also a political scientist, although I'm not going to apologize for being a political scientist So and again, this is also a sort of a chapter for the project that Mariano mentioned so trying to take sort of a view of the state of the field on Political parties and the role of inequality. So that's what I'm going to try to do and sort of take a bit of a descriptive Mostly descriptive approach here So we've I think seen this already or this has already been discussed but as a Person who sort of focuses a lot on the the micro level These are some of our data from from laptop Levels of support for redistribution across the region if you look this is the most recent face-to-face survey in 2018 19 We have high levels of support for redistribution So the question asks whether or not people agree with the statement government should reduce income differences between the rich and the poor So this is a sort of standard way of measuring support for government redistribution and it's very high across the region you can see that there are differences between People who are poorer and people who are richer and this is sort of consistent with sort of a An insight of the Meltzer Richard model. I'm not comparing sort of medians and means here But richer people are less likely to support redistribution poorer people are more likely to support redistribution And this is important later on So at the same time we have and Mariano already showed this sort of low levels of redistribution compared especially to Western Europe Where you get typically lower levels of support for redistribution in the public So why so little redistribution of course? There's lots of sort of arguments out there and Mariano's already summarized some of them The sort of state capacity argument that states are simply unable to redistribute in the same way that European states have been There are some prominent arguments in political science on the role of electoral rules and particularly sort of proportional systems versus Majoritarian systems also arguments about Ideology and partisanship of government In some sense neither of these is is totally satisfying We have some states particularly in the southern cone with relatively higher levels of state capacity that still don't Redistribute at the same levels that we see in other parts of the world in Europe We also have electoral rules that supposedly are going to lead to more redistribution so the sort of Famous work in this area by Iverson and sascus and others Suggested that majoritarian systems like the US like the UK are going to redistribute less But throughout most of Latin America we have the kinds of systems that should lend themselves to more redistribution Weak labor movements is another argument obviously the sort of emergence of the sort of modern welfare state coincides with the emergence of labor movements in Europe But it also does in parts of Latin America particularly again in the southern cone We do have weaker labor movements in some countries, but actually quite strong labor movements in other parts So I'm going to focus on Two other arguments in the literature to tie this in particular to the role of political parties one feature of Latin America and it's a feature of Latin America that is Fairly persistent although there's some variation across countries and variation over time Is that we have relatively weak parties particularly as compared to Western European parties? We also have in this sort of relates to the literature on elite capture We also have a context of a certain level of elite capture which I'm going to sort of characterize in a more kind of Microway in political inequality that is governments respond to the preferences of affluent Citizens and and not to the preferences of poor citizens who are demanding more Redistribution, so I'll focus on on those two and Rather than sort of summarize all of the literature sort of show you a little bit of kind of descriptive Evidence that this is going on Okay, so before I do that so to start with with parties Why do strong parties matter and and there's a sort of a long literature on this in political science? What we call party system institutionalization so party system institutionalization is something about the Predictability of party systems that the same parties compete in elections over time That provides a certain amount of predictability for voters, but also a certain amount of predictability for politicians or ambitious politicians that is that the way to Have a career in politics is to work through a particular set of political parties And to work your way up the ranks within those political parties, right? This is part of the reason that proportional systems are thought to be Sort of more redistributed more redistributive So this gives you sort of a longer time horizon. It means that political parties have Or the leadership of political parties Has some interest in a sort of longer term ability to Win office or win over constituencies and win elections in the future more than just winning perhaps the next election, right? So there's predictable patterns of party competition and predictable voter bases, right? Voters are also going to become More likely to vote for particular parties They're going to identify with political parties and therefore be sort of reliable supporters again that gives politicians a sort of longer time horizon when they're thinking about policymaking The other feature of why strong parties matters is that redistribution actual redistribution right policies that actually reduce inequality rather than policies that simply redistribute government resources to constituencies right to your particular Electoral base in the short term is that you need to break you need to build broad-based coalitions in order to get sort of universalistic The kind of universalistic social welfare policy That actually reduces inequality that actually the kind of redistribution that we're interested in and so in order to do that and I think the European experience bears this out in order to do that you need strong parties Committed to building those kinds of coalitions and these things take a significant amount of time and we get sort of the emergence of large welfare states In the norways of the world that that Mariano described Targeted rewards are less costly for weak parties. You don't have to build a strong coalition a sort of large Political coalition in order to create these kinds of policies. You can simply target rewards in the short term at your particular electoral constituents and And not do it in a way that actually sort of reduces inequality necessarily Even if you're a left party right which presumably we think the left is sort of associated with a programmatic commitment to reducing inequality All right, just to show you a little bit descriptively that these things actually seem to correlate with each other I'm going to look at some measures of party system institutionalization There's lots of ways and there's lots of debate in the literature on how these things should be measured One way to measure them is simply to look at volatility over time so one feature of you know, the concept that I described is that in sort of weaker We weakly institutionalized party systems. We're going to see more turnover of political parties We're going to see sort of more fragmentation of political parties and this is maybe one place where Leopoldo and Santiago's Sort of intuitions differ with the the kinds of intuitions that the literature on party systems has Where turnover in a sense is bad right turnover means weak party system institutionalization That means there's less predictability in the system and that means that you're not going to get the kind of sort of broad-based redistribution that we might expect so So one measure I'm going to look at is electoral volatility. It's not sort of a perfect measure It doesn't measure all the other sort of pieces of this concept that we might care about The other is varieties of democracy which does sort of expert surveys has these Annual I think measures of party system institutionalization as sort of a broader concept and I'll look at those as well I'll show you that that correlates With inequality. I'm going to look at disposable income inequality Like Leopoldo and Santiago I presented this a month ago and and haven't done a whole lot since but I did do one thing that Chico Asked me to do which is to look at better inequality data because he didn't like the inequality data that I was using I'll show you that too, but I but I use I use Nora's data too. So which everybody likes And and then I'll I'll show you redistribution as well That's that it's going to be the percentage change in Genie as we go for market inequality to disposable inequality, right? So taking into account taxes and transfers So this is what that looks like if you use Nora's data Which doesn't have a lot of as many data points in Latin America and and and maybe actually as I was sitting here Seeing Mariano's stuff on the Norway's of the world may be sort of looking at the entire world would Make more sense and and not just focus on Latin America, but you can see that more Institutionalized party systems have lower levels of inequality more institutionalized party systems also Exhibit higher levels of redistribution within the sort of band of variation that we have in Latin America Which again is sort of lower than other parts of the of the world So, you know, you might look at that and say, you know We don't really know where party system institutionalization comes from here and maybe it comes from inequality I Think we know a fair amount about where weak party systems come from There they are partly a function of the particular rules that we have in Latin America Which is that although we have proportional systems. We also have presidents unlike European political systems and the combination of presidents with sort of more fragmented Legislatures is quite different from the parliamentary PR systems that we see In in Western Europe and so we get weak parties in part because presidents don't have to have Strong parties whereas prime ministers obviously do We also get weaker parties in contexts of sort of legacies of dictatorship Legacies of conflict, of course if you look for instance at the Brazilian party system was sort of Taken apart by the dictatorship and sort of replaced During the dictatorship of course is also transformed since then And I've done some work arguing that the market reforms of the 1980s and 90s also Substantially weakened party systems across the region so I don't think there's a there's sort of Obvious theoretical reasons to think that in the short term high levels of inequality are Changing levels of party system institutionalization Even so so you know using Data where we can sort of you know at least include some fixed effects And these are the data that Chico doesn't like We still get sort of relationships here even if we're just leveraging change Sort of year-to-year change over time rather than differences across countries So yeah great So party systems matter and weak party systems matter for Inequality and and redistribution And the other thing that matters that I want to talk about is political inequality and sort of the the idea of Sort of elite capture So So I've done some looking into this and there's a kind of burgeoning literature on what political scientists called congruence the sort of Relationship between the preferences of voters and the preferences of or the positions of elected representatives in Legislatures So we have some work looking at a co-author and I have some work looking at sort of all the countries in the world Where we could get some data There's also a bunch of studies on policy responsiveness looking at sort of preferences of voters and Policymaking that happens subsequent to those sort of public opinion surveys There's a bunch of countries and this kind of started with US data and and people have done this for sort of a broader set of countries There's this is a little bit hard to do in Latin America because our surveys don't tend to ask policy questions We tend to ask sort of general. Do you like the president? questions, we don't ask You know whether or not you like this particular policy proposal or things like that so it's Unfortunately, we don't have a lot of that in Latin America, but The sort of upshot here is that regardless of kind of how you look at this elected representatives Consistently reflect and respond to the preferences of the rich and and just about not to the preferences of anyone else Sometimes including the middle and I'll just show you an example of that from Latin America using some of laptops data From 2010 2012 and 2014 the reason I chose those years is because it corresponds to some Surveys of members of Parliament in Latin America from the the surveys that Salamanca the University of Salamanca does the parliamentary elites data set so we can match the elite respondents write the representatives responding to the same questions that were put to Public opinion to the masses in the America's barometer So I'm going to look at economic policy using sort of a few items combined into an index And I'm going to split up citizens by different levels of household wealth, which you know, I'm happy to To talk about and this is what that looks like. So what we've done here is we've taken the poorest 20% so up to the 20th percentile Their preferences here on the economic dimension are normalized to zero within each country and I'm averaging across the three years that we have The circles that you see here are the preferences of the top 20th percentile So the the 80th percentile and up the top 20th 20 percent of citizens You can see that almost everywhere their preferences are to the right right sort of less government intervention in Economic policymaking right or the economy. Let's say less interventionist with the exception of Argentina Which is curious interesting and on the rest Just about in every case if you look at the squares Those are the preferences of the elected representatives when asked the same questions and you can see that sort of across the board Those people are even further to the right sort of less supportive of government intervention in the kinds of things that that might reduce Inequality and again, there's some interesting sort of differences Bolivia in this period and things like that But this is consistent with the kinds of things we see In in other parts of the world as well So, you know, you could take this as sort of micro evidence of you know elite capture or or something like that But it's also I think not obvious that declines in The strength of parties has really undermined this or that's something that that I think is maybe a bit of attention between the the two papers So You know one way of explaining the under provision that I think Political scientists have increasingly been working on is is to focus on weak parties and political inequality As explaining the the persistent economic inequality that we see in the region There's implications here for public opinion. I think To the extent that these things have persisted over time or possibly even increased over time and there's some debate in the literature on whether this has always been true or Has been sort of more true It does seem to be correlated with People's perceptions so people are aware that their elected representatives are not responding to the kinds of things That they're demanding and and that is also correlated with support for political outsiders populism the kinds of things that we tend to see lower trust in government and and things like that And as I said a month ago, there are some things I still want to do possibly sort of doing this sub-nationally within Argentina or Brazil where we can get Lower level inequality data The political inequality sort of measures that I've shown you You know to the extent that it sort of stays in this chapter at all It I think what I'd like to do is look at this by parties and party systems To be able to link that back to this idea of weak parties and strong parties But I'll leave it there and look forward to your questions and comments. Thanks