This article investigates the political cost of poverty in democracies marked by deep social divisions. We develop a probabilistic voting model that incorporates clientelism as a strategic tool employed by elite political parties to secure electoral support from non-elite voters. Unlike models...

Market forces beyond individual control are a central driver of income inequality, a phenomenon we refer to as market luck. In meritocratic societies, this raises the question of whether individuals perceive such inequalities as fair. To address this question, we conduct experiments in the US,...

Over the last decades, the United States has experienced a large increase in, both, income inequality and living standards. The workhorse models of optimal income taxation call for more redistribution as inequality rises. By contrast, living standards play no role for taxes and transfers in...

This paper establishes three novel findings on fairness and redistribution by combining theory-driven experimental games with large-scale surveys in the U.S. and five European countries. First, individuals revealing egalitarian, libertarian, or meritocratic fairness preferences in experimental...

Levels of interpersonal income inequality in African countries are much higher than they were long assumed to be. The literature on politics in sub-Saharan Africa says little about the redistributive pressures arising from this, other than to argue that class politics is rarely observed in...