How is it possible that American taxes be progressive, while achieving so little redistribution? The answer is that redistribution is not driven primarily by the structure of taxation, but by its level.

More at her Monkey Cage post.

For this year, I’m the Director of the MSc in International Politics here at Trinity. On the one hand, that makes me biased. On the other, I can tell you that it provides a great opportunity to build on your undergraduate education with a rigorous training focused on the international dimension of politics.

“Who Gets What, When, How” at the global scale. Why? Human rights. Foreign policy. Political economy. Environmental politics. Violent conflict. War and peace!

Research-active scholars will teach you in small seminar groups. You’ll develop your analytical skills and your ability to express ideas to others. You’ll spend a year in a great city. If all goes well, you’ll have a credential from a highly respected European university steeped in history.

I’ve already started doing admissions, so you’d best get along to the course pages to find out more and start the application process.

As per my previous post, I’ve had a paper accepted. The next task is to adjust the manuscript so that it conforms to the journal’s style sheet, and then to get it into a .doc file for submission. I write in LaTeX, so the latter, at least, is non-trivial. After about a day of experimenting, here’s what I came up with.

First, switch to biblatex for handling your citations. It’s really easy and makes life much better! To do this, and go quite far in getting towards the desired document style, add the following code in the preamble of your tex file.


\usepackage[style=verbose-trad1, natbib=true, sortcites=true, block=space, isbn=false, url=false, doi=false, dashed=false, dateabbrev=false]{biblatex}
\bibliography{path/to/your.bib}


Now make sure that (nearly) all of your citations use the autocite command, rather than citep. (YMMV with \citet commands.) One great thing here is that \autocite is smart enough to handle punctuation immediately following the command in the right way. So, using foo bar \autocite{Hicks2012}. will get rendered as something like either “foo bar (Hicks 2012).” or “foo bar.¹”, where the note points to the full reference. You can now toggle between the two by simply setting a different style= in the biblatex options (above), and there should be basically no manual editing required.

That gets you quite far towards the correct styles, but not all of the way. Put the following in your tex file’s preamble to tweak various things. In fact, for my own purposes, I have separated this out into a tex file of its own (called ‘comparativepoliticsstyles.tex’), which I include with \input{path/to/comparativepoliticsstyles.tex.


% % % % From http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/10682/suppress-in-biblatex/10686#10686.

% Make footnotes the same size as the normal text.
\renewcommand{\footnotesize}{\normalsize}


Almost there. You now need to run mk4ht oolatex your_file.tex from the command line. This will generate a .odt file that you can open with OpenOffice, and then convert to a .doc file. You’ll need to use the Tools->Footnotes/Endnotes dialog to position all footnotes at the end of the document, thus making them endnotes. (This is possible on the LaTeX side, but I found that autocites with multiple references came up empty when I did this.)

That should do it, except for the idiosyncracies I’ve probably forgotten.

I argue that the UK got the statist and centralised National Health Service it did immediately after the Second World War because Bevan felt that this would prove more difficult for “the vandals opposite”, in the form of the Tories, to undo. This was important because the NHS was a significant mechanism for redistribution.

I contrast this with the the Swedish Social Democrats’ explicit rejection of an NHS model and subsequent pursuit of a more cash-centric insurance design. Such a model was both less redistributive and (potentially) more malleable for future governments. I argue that they took this course as they were able to rely on redistribution in other areas – notably centralised wage-bargaining – making health policy less politically divisive.

I need to make some minor revisions before publication, but a very recent draft is available via SSRN. The paper has been accepted at Comparative Politics.

• Martin Wolf arguing that “America’s inequality need not determine the future of Britain“
• Greg Mankiw pointing to a paper looking at how the rich earn their livings
• John Sides on “The Politics of the Top 1 Percent“
• Andrew Gelman on how “Surveys show Americans are populist class warriors, except when they aren’t
• Andrew Gelman pointing to a post of his own and some political science responses on “on how politicians try to mold public opinion“
• Larry Bartels and Marc Hetherington on “Surprising Trust in Government“

Updated 2012/01/03

• Daron Acemoglu’s FiveBooks interview on inequality
• A video of a Harvard Kennedy School panel discussion on inequality

As inequality has been a theme in both classes, I have uploaded an export of the “Top Incomes” data from Atkinson et al to the class WebCT pages. (It’s available from the web site directly, but the export can be slightly fiddly.) It is a .csv file that you should be able to open in any spreadsheet (e.g. Excel).

Klaus Armingeon and collaborators make available two data sets – “Comparative Political Data Set I (23 OECD Countries)” and “Comparative Political Data Set II (28 Post Communist Countries)” – on their website. This aggregates together data from a whole variety of sources. See the codebooks for details of the variables, but you’ll find measures of electoral turnout, female political representation, electoral proportionality, welfare spending, and numerous others. They provide the data in the Excel format.

The Quality of Government Insitute at Gothenburg makes available “The QoG Time-Series Data” that you can find by clicking on the “Data” tab to the left of the home page. This data set is even larger than the Armingeon et al ones, and covers many more variables as well as many more countries. Again, see the codebook. The file is available in the .csv format.

Updated (2011/11/10)

Frederick Solt provides “The Standardized World Income Inequality Database“.