Political parties face a crucial trade-off between electoral and partisan goals: should they put electoral goals first, pursuing the policies they think will win them the most votes in the next election, or should they put partisan goals first, pursuing the policies their members, activists, and most loyal voters prefer? In this paper we argue that main political parties make different choices depending on the information environment they are in. They have strong incentives to follow the median voter when the median voter's position is well known, but when there is more uncertainty they have strong incentives to adopt policies they prefer for partisan reasons, since uncertainty makes party leaders more willing to bet that the party's preferred policies are also vote winners. We develop an empirical analysis of how the main parties on the left and the right in twenty democracies have changed their platforms from election to election since the 1960s.

This study explains redistribution and income inequality by revisiting traditional approaches. The predictions of the two dominant theories, the median voter hypothesis (the Meltzer–Richard model) and the power resources theory are regarded as contrasting, and have seldom been incorporated under a single framework. I develop a composite model of inequality by combining their core arguments within the framework of party competition. This study also analyses stages of inequality formation, namely market wage inequality and redistribution, and adds in a dynamic component to the model, completing the cycle of income distribution. The model is supported empirically with data from 18 Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development countries from 1970 to 2009. I demonstrate the joint relevance and significance of the two theories, showing that they are not necessarily mutually exclusive and should be properly addressed from both theoretical perspectives.

Since 1990 the age of the average OECD median voter has increased three times faster than in the preceding 30 years. We use panel data from 1980–2002 to investigate the effects of population aging on both the program size and the benefit generosity of public pensions in 18 OECD countries. Population aging is accompanied by cutting smaller slices out of larger cakes: it increases aggregate spending on pensions but freezes or decreases the generosity of individual benefits. Controlling for political, institutional and time-period effects, we find that public pension efforts are significantly mediated by welfare regime type. Moreover, since the late 1980s pension effort has more fully adopted a retrenchment logic. It is the politics of fiscal and electoral straitjackets, not gerontocracy, which shape public pension spending today. While population aging is accelerating, contrary to alarmist political economy predictions democracies are not yet dominated by a new distributive politics of elderly power.

Bien qu'il est généralement admis en économie publique que le fossé qui sépare l'approche positive des choix publics et leur approche normative implique l'existence de possibles pareto améliorations dans les choix en matiere de dépense publique, il semble que l'économiste manque d'outils adéquats pour déterminer la réelle importance de ces possibles améliorations. Le présent article vise à combler, en partie, le manque et met plus particulierement l'accent sur les inefficacités coût dans la production de biens et services publics locaux. En effet, ces inefficacités étant indubitablement des inefficacités paretiennes, elles sont nécessairement à l'origine d'un gaspillage des ressources fiscales. Une méthode paramétrique fondée sur l'application du concept économétrique de frontière stochastique au concept microéconomique de fonction d'utilité en équivalent monétaire est développée puis appliquée dans le contexte du modèle bien connu de l'electeur médian. Une mise œuvre à partir de données sur les communes françaises est finalement proposée.