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Annual Review of Political Science

Volume 17, 2014

Inequality and Institutions: The Case of Economic Coordination*

Abstract

The understanding of observable associations between institutions and inequality today requires a better grasp of the process driving the selection of economic institutions, in particular wage bargaining centralization agreements, as the outcome of a distributive conflict in which inequality itself plays a prominent role. Low levels of inequality facilitated the adoption of encompassing wage centralization agreements during the early twentieth century in Europe, thereby creating a long-term association between low inequality and high centralization that, for a large subset of cases, remained stable throughout the century. We develop a theoretical argument as to why inequality should lead to lower levels of coordination and test it against competing hypotheses on the basis of a database on 11 OECD nations between the 1910s and the 1950s.

Keyword(s): economic coordination, inequality, institutions, redistribution
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/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-polisci-032211-210535
2014-05-11
2024-04-19
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/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-polisci-032211-210535
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Inequality and Institutions: The Case of Economic Coordination*
Annual Review of Political Science 17, 251 (2014); https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-polisci-032211-210535
/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-polisci-032211-210535
/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-polisci-032211-210535
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