This chapter reviews and reconciles two theories of voting. Rational man models treat voters as actors seeking to maximize their material self-interest. Because their policy knowledge is limited, they often rely on ideology, trusted figures, and information picked up in the course of everyday activities to reach a decision. By comparison, survey evidence has shown that many voters are social, i.e. routinely adopt the opinions of those around them. The chapter concludes by describing various theoretical frameworks which unify these models. The combined models typically predict new behaviors in which initially small majorities are typically amplified; established opinions resist change for long periods; and very dramatic, once-in-a-generation events can abruptly reshuffle voters beliefs.

What has allowed inequalities in material resources to mount in advanced democracies? This chapter considers the role of media reporting on the economy in weakening accountability mechanisms that might otherwise have incentivized governments to pursue more equal outcomes. Building on prior work on the United States, we investigate how journalistic depictions of the economy relate to real distributional developments across OECD countries. Using sentiment analysis of economic news content, we demonstrate that the evaluative content of the economic news strongly and disproportionately tracks the fortunes of the very rich and that good (bad) economic news is more common in periods of rising (falling) income shares at the top. We then propose and test an explanation in which pro-rich biases in news tone arise from a journalistic focus on the performance of the economy in the aggregate, while aggregate growth is itself positively correlated with relative gains for the rich. The chapter’s findings suggest that the democratic politics of inequality may be shaped in important ways by the skewed nature of the informational environment within which citizens form economic evaluations.

A new literature on advanced democracies questions the capacity of majorities to influence fiscal policies to advance their distributive interests, either because the modern state is undercut by increasingly footloose capital, or because the wealthy subvert the majority will through the power of money. This paper critically assesses the evidence using an amended dataset from the Luxembourg Income Study and new data from the World Inequality Database (WID). We use a three-class setup and axiomatically derive the distributive interests of each class and then assess these predictions against data on transfers, public services, and insurance for eighteen OECD countries since the 1970s. For the middle class, the transfer ratio (transfers and services as a percent of the net income of the rich) is remarkably stable, and with the notable exception of the United States, so is the relative position of the middle class in the overall income distribution. Top-end inequality and measures of globalization play no role, but both the poor and the middle class do better under center-left governments.

In light of Mozambique’s natural resources boom—especially its large-scale investments in mining, oil, and gas—this chapter analyses the prospects for the extractive industries to contribute to economic transformation from an institutional perspective. For this purpose, we address the institutional dynamics of the resources sector and consider the underlying causes of the identified outcomes, and we discuss the National Development Strategy, as the instrument outlining the vision for economic transformation and diversification. The chapter is based on a desk review—documental and bibliographic—and on primary data gathered by the authors as part of their research into the field of natural resources and the political economy of development. We conclude that, given Mozambique’s political patronage and clientelism, intra-ruling elite competition, limited productive base, weak state capacity, high level of poverty, and recurrent fiscal deficits, the prospects of the current resource boom leading to economic transformation, despite its considerable potential, are at best uncertain.

The central aim of this chapter is to analyse the impact institutions have on the performance of the health sector in Mozambique. The chapter demonstrates that institutions play a central role among the social determinants of health – and, through it, on economic and social development – particularly for the poorer and more vulnerable, such as children, women, the disabled, and the elderly. It is also argued that the deficiencies and inefficiencies of the operation of the health sector are largely the result of the fact that institutions with influence on the health sector are controlled by a minority of privileged people, who do not give the appropriate priority to the basic health needs of the majority of the population. Finally, it is argued that the most important measures for improving the state of health of Mozambicans are the revision of the Constitution of the Republic, and the strengthening of the National Health System (particularly the National Health Service) alongside the social contract, reducing poverty and economic and social inequality.

At independence in 1975, the Frelimo government took over public administration and started transforming it. The public financial management (PFM) system was adapted to central planning and management of the economy in line with nationalist and Marxist-Leninist thinking. While collapse followed in the mid-1980s, the PFM system was gradually and systematically reformed towards more transparent and efficient mechanisms, and successful reforms did coincide with high growth rates for more than 20 years, after 1993. As the nationalist agenda became more forceful from around 2005–10, when the natural gas reserves in the Rovuma Basin were confirmed, natural resources became the main focus as a source of revenue — severe cracks in the PFM system started to emerge. The ‘hidden debt’ scandal in 2013–14, renewed conflict between Frelimo and Renamo from 2013, and the insurgency war in Cabo Delgado from 2017 put the PFM system under pressure and performance suffered accordingly. The chapter demonstrates how difficult it is to make institutional reforms work, within a structure of political and economic power that may not benefit from them, even in a context of a high degree of aid dependence.

Racism is a leading explanation for the lack of redistribution in the United States compared to other advanced democracies. But how does this work? This paper investigates how racism interrupts support for redistribution. I use analytic listening of broadcasts about the May 25, 2020, murder of George Floyd and resulting protests that aired on right-leaning local talk radio shows from five communities in predominantly white, nonmetro areas of the northern United States, and broadcasts from three left-leaning shows that serve as bases of comparison to investigate. I find that the hosts and most callers on the conservative shows actively deflect attention away from racism in the United States. Through the lenses with which they treat racism, there is little possibility for feeling empathy with lower-income people of color. The results draw attention to a Republican framing in which Democrats are using attention to racism to achieve downward redistribution.

This chapter briefly describes the Madisonian or mainstream American political thought that the book seeks to describe and update. Given that the Constitution has been amended 27 times since 1787, this is clearly a moving target. Moreover, The Federalist barely mentions such centrally-important institutions as parties, newspapers, and Big Government bureaucracies. The chapter identifies various 20th Century texts that that fill these gaps.

This chapter begins by arguing that rule of law exists in the probabilistic sense that dispassionate judges often reach similar legal conclusions for reasons that appear to be universal across humans. Well-designed legal systems amplify these probabilities so that majority opinion quickly hardens into clear rules. Still, the question remains why judges should elevate rule of law above their own personal preferences. The answer seems to be that the legal communities they serve value and reward predictable outcomes. Still, the strength of this incentive varies from one era to the next, and is almost always weaker in highly polarized eras. Politicians threats to pack or otherwise hamstring the Court can compromise its rulings. Despite this, the Court remains an indispensable check on Congress, the Executive Branch and, through the antitrust laws, private power.

The chapter reviews the geographic aspects of Madisons system at the local, state, and regional levels. It begins with the crucially important rules that translate citizens votes into seats in Congress. It then describes how the advent of computers made it easier for politicians to evade traditional anti-gerrymandering rules and argues for an alternative, computerized approach that is simultaneously neutral, transparent, and respects the constitutional principle community. The scheme is further described in an Appendix. The chapter then turns to the states role in fostering political consensus within their borders while leaving room for different policy choices on the national scale. It concludes by examining how voters pushed the federal government into expansive missions that undermined the Framers principle of limited government and produced a bloody Civil War. The result was a new uncertainty over just where federal power begins and ends which still exists today.

Like many nations, the United States is undergoing a revolution in economic and political geography. The shift from an industrial to a knowledge economy is feeding both political polarization and economic polarization. Scholars of American political development have long stressed that the United States’ diverse economic geography and strongly territorialized institutions encourage sectional policy conflict. Prominent scholars of contemporary politics have similarly argued that territorially based representation encourages policy responsiveness to local communities. We argue to the contrary that several key mediating factors – the increasing antiurban and status quo bias of American political institutions, the nationalization of US party coalitions, and the path-dependent character of inherited policy regimes – have greatly weakened the representation of place-based economic interests (PBEIs) in contemporary American politics. Indeed, because of these “filters,” each of the nation’s two major party coalitions manifests what we call a “PBEI paradox,” a set of policy commitments starkly at odds with the underlying economic needs of the areas that vote for it.

Fairness concerns are ubiquitous in the realm of redistributive politics. This chapter builds on research across the social sciences to provide a parsimonious approach to the study of fairness “in action.” In Western democracies, reasoning about the fairness of redistributive social policies implies two types of fairness evaluation: (1) how fair is it for some to make (a lot) more money than others in the marketplace, and (2) how fair is it for some to receive more in benefits than they pay in taxes? Each question calls to mind a different norm of fairness: the proportionality norm, which prescribes that individual rewards be proportional to effort and talent, and the reciprocity norm, which prescribes that cooperative behavior be rewarded more than uncooperative behavior. Agreement with these two norms is quasi-universal. Where people differ is in their beliefs about the prevalence of norm-violating outcomes and behaviors. Accounting for the nature and empirical manifestations of fairness reasoning provides a new understanding of the demand side of redistributive politics in times of rising equality.

This chapter briefly reviews the books main arguments and offers limited reforms to improve the Framers design. The deepest challenges involve the characteristically 21st Century debates over COVID, global warming, and the Black Lives Matter movement. Given that even the experts disagree, neither side is likely to persuade the other any time soon. The challenge for the Constitution is to manage the debate for years and even decades. Here the best option is to promote a pragmatic politics that encourages politicians to try different solutions, and just as promptly discard them when they fail. Obvious reforms include safeguards to ensure that key research is never blocked to defend political arguments, and sunset laws that automatically eliminate statutes that fail to show results.