The Political Economy of Xenophobia and Distribution: The Case of Denmark*

Abstract

For the first time in some years, a conservative government came to power in Denmark in 2001, due primarily to the citizenry's disaffection with social-democratic policies on immigration. We represent political competition in Denmark as taking place over two issues-the size of the public sector and immigration-and model political equilibrium using the party unanimity Nash equilibrium (PUNE) concept, which generates equilibria on multidimensional policy spaces where parties form endogenously. By fitting the model to Danish data, we argue that citizen xenophobia may be expected to decrease the size of the Danish public sector by an amount between 12% and 36% of one standard deviation of the probability distribution of citizens' ideal points of the size of the public sector.

Political institutions and income (re-)distribution: evidence from developed economies

“…Ethno-linguistic fractionalization is connected to the arguments brought forward by Roemer and van der Straeten (2006). The Gastil index attempts to control for democracy as such, and the age of democracy aims at controlling indirectly for the impact of interest groups.…”

Does Religion Distract the Poor?

“…Recent work (Roemer & Van der Straeten, 2004) extends to three parties, but the basic logic is the same as the two-party model.…”

Identity and Redistribution

“…1 The view that there are multiple dimensions of political con ‡ict provokes the question under what circumstances there is salient political con ‡ict along a particular dimension. This question has previously been addressed from a "political supply-side" perspective, i.e., why politicians may want to bundle policies on economic and non-economic issues for given voter preferences (e.g., Roemer, 1998, Lee and Roemer, 2006 and Roemer and van der Straeten, 2005Straeten, , 2006. In this paper, we focus on the complementary "demand-side" question about the determinants of voter preferences for redistribution.…”