Does Voting for the Winner Make Your Group Better Off? How Vote Choice Affects (Relative) Group Income & Wellbeing Growth in the United Kingdom

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The current empirical literature on distributive politics withinadvanced democracies focuses on answering variants of thefollowing question - which areas do governments favourwhen making expenditure decisions? In this project, Icombine this traditional empirical strategy with a differentapproach, where I analyse whether the voting behaviour ofdifferent groups (defined by characteristics such as income,age etc.) determines the extent to which governmentsfavour them when making distributive decisions. In particular,I examine whether groups who voted for the government atthe last election, or who could be persuaded to vote for thegovernment at the next election, are also the beneficiaries ofdistributive decisions that enhance their income andwellbeing. By exploiting the discontinuities around generalelections, I identify the causal effect of changes in thecomposition of (persuadable) voters on changes to taxation,social security policies and well-being. Finally, I implement aninequality decomposition to estimate how much of theincome and wellbeing inequality between groups can beexplained by changes in the composition of (persuadable)voters