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

目前关于先进民主国家分配政治的实证文献侧重于回答以下问题的变体--政府在做出支出决策时喜欢哪些领域？在这个项目中，我将这一传统的经验策略与一种不同的方法结合起来，分析不同群体(由收入、年龄等特征定义)的投票行为。决定政府在作出分配决策时偏袒他们的程度。特别是，我考察了在上一次选举中投票支持政府的群体，或者在下一次选举中可能被说服投票给政府的群体，是否也是提高他们收入和福祉的分配决定的受益者。通过利用大选的不连续性，我确定了(可说服的)选民构成变化对税收、社会保障政策和福祉变化的因果影响。最后，我实现了一个不平等分解，以估计群体之间的收入和福祉不平等在多大程度上可以通过(可说服的)选民构成的变化来解释

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