democracy is profitable to everyone in society inequality
Answers
Answer:
what's the question friend ???
Explanation:
Answer:In many societies throughout history, land has been the most important form of wealth, and it is thought that inequality of landholdings is invariably bad for democracy. Abundant evidence from individual countries shows that this can be the case. To take one important example, Ziblatt (2008, 2009) has shown how inequality of landholding helped thwart and corrupt the development of democracy in Germany. But what about the broader comparative evidence? Do democratic countries enact policies that reduce land inequality more than their authoritarian counterparts do?
The answer to the first question seems to be a clear “no.” Many of the most significant twentieth-century land reforms were implemented by autocratic governments in places such as China, Korea, and Taiwan. In the most comprehensive study to date on land reform in Latin America, Albertus (2015) has found that democratic governments have engaged in far less land redistribution than have their authoritarian counterparts. He argues that whether land reform occurs depends less on whether a democratic or authoritarian regime is in place, and more on whether a split emerges between a country's landholding elite and its ruling elite.
The Latin American context provides a very useful environment to consider land reform and democracy because so many countries in the region have oscillated between democratic and authoritarian rule. Albertus (2015) has constructed a variable that, for each country in the region for each year since 1930, measures the percentage of total land that was redistributed through land reform. Using his data, one can compare the average level of redistribution in democracies and autocracies using the definition of democracy first proposed by Przeworski et al. (2000), the presence of elections in which multiple political parties compete. Based on Albertus's data, in autocracies the average level of redistribution was about 1% of total land per year. In democracies the level of redistribution was only about a third of this (0.38%).
An arguably more convincing empirical strategy would be a difference-in-differences approach looking only at within-country variation instead of cross-sectional variation. With the caveat that land inequality is extremely persistent over time (the correlation between land inequality circa 1950 and land inequality circa 1990 is 0.90), estimation of a difference-in-differences specification suggested no correlation whatsoever between land inequality and democracy. We also considered whether our null findings for the 1970–1989 and 1990–2009 periods and in the difference-in-differences specification were attributable to the fact that we had adopted a fairly minimalist definition of democracy based on the simple presence of competitive elections. To evaluate this possibility, we also examined the correlation between land inequality and indices of freedom of expression and the free character of elections that have been constructed by the Varieties of Democracy project. Our results paralleled those for our main democracy measure; there was a negative correlation between land inequality and democracy between 1950 and 1969 but not in other specifications. We should emphasize that the above findings are based on a feasible identification strategy rather than a particularly credible one. It is still surprising how little support there is for the idea that higher land inequality makes it more difficult for democracies to emerge and sustain themselves. In the next section, we consider this same question using data on top wealth shares.
EVIDENCE FROM TOP WEALTH SHARES
Several important research projects have recently produced new data or compiled existing data on top wealth shares in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Roine & Waldenstrom (2015) review the progress made in measuring historical wealth inequality and compile data for 10 countries. We use these data along with wealth inequality measures for Ireland produced by Turner (2010). The countries that we consider are Australia, Denmark, Finland, France, Ireland, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. We focus our attention on the proportion of wealth owned by the top 1%. As Roine & Waldenstrom emphasize, there are important differences across countries in the methodologies used for constructing this measure. For some countries the data are based on wealth taxes, and the wealth-holding unit is the household, whereas for other countries the data derives from estate taxes, and the wealth-holding unit is the individual. These and other differences mean that comparisons across countries need to be made with great caution and that our primary emphasis is to describe changes over time within countries. Finally, there are considerably fewer data available for the nineteenth than the twentieth century, which affects how we approach the evidence.