Pablo Beramendi
Biographic Data
| ID | 915128 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Pablo Beramendi |
| GIVEN NAMES | Pablo |
| FAMILY NAME | Beramendi |
| SIGNATURE | BERAMENDI P |
| AFFILIATIONS | Duke University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9990-0057 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 31 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 362 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 30 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1982 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Principles of Political Equality and the Logic of Power
At its core, democracy carries a promise of political equality that rests on rules, norms, and procedures that govern the polity to afford equal consideration and freedom from domination to every member. However, despite being widely cherished, political equality is rarely defined precisely. This article offers a framework for studying political equality that can be used to organize thinking. We begin with an idealized notion of direct democracy,…
Resilient Democracies
The Distributive Basis of Tax Compliance
Political equality: What is it and why does it matter?
Political inequality is a distinctive type of inequality, which cannot be reduced to economic or power inequalities. The article frames political equality as trying to achieve ‘equal consideration’ among members of a polity, arguing that assessing whether this is achieved requires looking at process as well as outcomes. The analysis focuses on two core dimensions that can be studied empirically: patterns of political participation and political r…
Political decentralisation and the spatial distribution of infant mortality in less developed nations
This paper focuses on political decentralisation as an institutional determinant of the level and spatial distribution of infant mortality rates (IMR). At the national level, we show that political decentralisation is linked to lower IMR, but these benefits are concentrated in high-income decentralised nations. In developing nations, decentralisation is associated with significantly higher spatial variation in IMR. We explore the mechanisms drivi…
The Electoral Effects of Large-Scale Infrastructure Policies: Evidence from a Rural Electrification Scheme in Brazil
This paper analyzes the conditions under which major infrastructural investments generate electoral returns. It addresses when and how the constraints imposed by myopic voters under democracy can be overcome. We argue that sustained policy spillovers are critical to broadening the pool of beneficiaries and yielding significant returns to the incumbent in the medium to long run. We make this case by analyzing Luz para Todos (LPT)-- a large-scale r…
Geography, Capacity, and Inequality: Spatial Inequality
In this Element, we investigate how economic geography, the distribution of subnational economic endowments within a nation, shapes long-run patterns of inequality through its impact on the development of fiscal capacity. We present an argument that links economic geography to capacity through different types of industrialization processes. We show how early industrializers shape spatial distributions domestically by investing in productivity acr…
Polarization and Accountability in Covid Times
We analyze the relationship between accountability and polarization in the context of the COVID crisis. We make three points. First, when voters perceive the out-party to be ideologically extreme, they are less likely to hold incumbents accountable for poor outcomes via competence-based evaluations. Knowing this, even in the context of major crises, incumbents face weaker incentives to take politically costly measures that would minimize deaths. …
The Political Geography of the Eurocrisis
The European Union provided a mixed response to the 2008 financial crisis. On the one hand, it refused to pursue fiscal integration through a common budget; on the other, it introduced significant transfers between countries that were designed to produce financial stabilization. The authors analyze this response as the outcome of democratic constraints on EU leaders. Given the EU’s current institutional structure, citizens’ preferences pose a bin…
Democracy under High Inequality: Capacity, Spending, and Participation
Contrary to the view that inequality reduces turnout, political participation among low-income voters is higher in democracies with high levels of inequality and intermediate levels of state capacity. We address this puzzle by analyzing the link between political mobilization and spending decisions at different levels of inequality and state capacity. Under high inequality and low levels of capacity, parties find it optimal to mobilize low-income…
Multi-modes for Detecting Experimental Measurement Error
Experiments should be designed to facilitate the detection of experimental measurement error. To this end, we advocate the implementation of identical experimental protocols employing diverse experimental modes. We suggest iterative nonparametric estimation techniques for assessing the magnitude of heterogeneous treatment effects across these modes. And we propose two diagnostic strategies—measurement metrics embedded in experiments, and measurem…
Economic Geography, Political Inequality, and Public Goods in the Original 13 U.S. States
A large and fruitful literature has focused on the impact of colonial legacies on long-term development. Yet the mechanisms through which these legacies get transmitted over time remain ambiguous. This article analyzes the choice and effects of legislative representation as one such mechanism, driven by elites interested in maximizing jointly economic prospects and political influence over time. We focus on malapportionment in the legislatures of…
Fiscal decentralization and the distributive incidence of the Great Recession
This paper argues that fiscal decentralization is one important explanation for variation in distributive outcomes following the Great Recession. Using a difference-in-differences approach, it examines how fiscal decentralization mediated the link between spatial distribution, redistributive effort and interpersonal inequality in 21 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries in the years following the Great Recession.…
Intra-Elite Competition and Long-Run Fiscal Development
This paper exploits an original database that spans 30-plus developed and developing nations between 1870 and 2010 to perform the first empirical analysis of the relationship between historical levels of intra-elite competition and fiscal development over the long run. We argue that the timing of industrialization affects the extent of historical competition between agricultural and capitalist elites, which in turn helps shape key initial decisio…
Barriers to Egalitarianism: Distributive Tensions in Latin American Federations
Latin America’s largest federations have significantly reduced their levels of income inequality in recent years, perhaps reflecting a structural change toward egalitarianism. However, we argue that the political geography of federalism in Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico strongly shapes preferences against centralized redistribution likely to promote equity in the long term. While federalism does not necessary lead to lower redistribution in theory…
Who Gives, Who Gains? Progressivity and Preferences
The extent to which popular support for the welfare state depends on income varies greatly across nations and policy domains. We argue and show formally that these variations—largely overlooked yet essential to understanding the politics of redistribution—reflect in part the design of tax and transfer policies in terms of progressivity. When progressivity is high, politics is perceived by income groups as a zero sum game and conflicts over who ge…
Constrained Partisanship and Economic Outcomes
The relative autonomy of politics, to use an expression slightly out of fashion, as a determinant of social and economic outcomes is yet again in the eye of the beholder. While some see processes such as globalization, deindustrialization, and more recently the Great Recession as a sign of structural factors overruling the ability of incumbents to pursue their agenda and shape the distribution of winners and losers across society, others see the …
Introduction: The Politics of Advanced Capitalism
In the concluding chapter of the 1999 volume Continuity and Change in Contemporary Capitalism, the then-editors affirmed that the most challenging part of the characterization of contemporary capitalism is to determine "how the cross-sectional patterns of variation, locked in through intricate pathways of industrialization and democratization, are shaped by growing global interdependence and domestic political and socioeconomic change" (Kitschelt…
Politics of Advanced Capitalism
The Politics of Advanced Capitalism
This book serves as a sequel to two distinguished volumes on capitalism: Continuity and Change in Contemporary Capitalism (Cambridge, 1999) and Order and Conflict in Contemporary Capitalism (1985). Both volumes took stock of major economic challenges advanced industrial democracies faced, as well as the ways political and economic elites dealt with them. However, during the last decades, the structural environment of advanced capitalist democraci…
Globalization, Public Finance, and Poverty
Global economic forces might impact poverty in any number of direct ways—by reducing prices, providing access to larger pools of capital, or creating and destroying jobs. Such forces might also work indirectly, that is, through their effect on labor standards, unionization rates, or the development of labor-saving technology. In this research note, we emphasize the impact of “globalization” on the poor via the path of public finances. This is a t…
Inequality and Institutions: The Case of Economic Coordination
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 ce…
The Behavioral Foundations of Social Politics: Evidence from Surveys and a Laboratory Democracy
The dominant theoretical approaches in the comparative political economy of the welfare state provide alternative accounts for why some governments spend more on social policies than others. In the first, poor voters seek to increase their current income by taxing the rich, and social policy serves to redistribute income from the rich to the poor. In the second account, voters seek social insurance against future job loss, and social policy serve…
The Political Geography of Inequality: Regions and Redistribution
This book addresses two questions - why some political systems have more centralized systems of interpersonal redistribution than others, and why some political unions make larger efforts to equalize resources among their constituent units than others. This book presents a new theory of the origin of fiscal structures in systems with several levels of government. The argument points to two major factors to account for the variation in redistribut…
Left Parties, Poor Voters, and Electoral Participation in Advanced Industrial Societies
Although income inequality is an important normative issue for students of democratic politics, little is known about its effects on citizens’ electoral participation. The authors develop a formal model of the incentives for left parties to mobilize lower income voters. It posits that countries’ income distributions and competition on the left provide different incentives for left parties to mobilize lower income voters. In the absence of politic…
Who Gives, Who Gains? Progressivity and Preferences
The extent to which popular support for the welfare state depends on income varies greatly across nations and policy domains. We argue and show formally that these variations—largely overlooked yet essential to understanding the politics of redistribution—reflect in part the design of tax and transfer policies in terms of progressivity. When progressivity is high, politics is perceived by income groups as a zero sum game and conflicts over who ge…
Social Democracy Constrained: Indirect Taxation in Industrialized Democracies
The determinants of the welfare state have received a great deal of attention in the comparative political economy literature. An analysis of the role that indirect taxation plays in the politics of advanced industrial societies is, however, missing. This article demonstrates that a full understanding of the links between redistribution, social democracy and corporatism is impossible without a closer look at indirect taxation. Conventional wisdom…
Left Parties, Poor Voters, and Electoral Participation in Advanced Industrial Societies
Although income inequality is an important normative issue for students of democratic politics, little is known about its effects on citizens’ electoral participation. The authors develop a formal model of the incentives for left parties to mobilize lower income voters. It posits that countries’ income distributions and competition on the left provide different incentives for left parties to mobilize lower income voters. In the absence of politic…
Inequality and the Territorial Fragmentation of Solidarity
A long tradition of research has shown decentralized political structures as an important cause behind lower levels of redistribution and higher levels of inequality. This article offers an alternative interpretation of the association between fragmented fiscal structures and higher levels of inequality. I argue that the distributive effects of decentralization depend on the preexisting territorial patterns of inequality. Therefore, the political…
Intra-Elite Competition and Long-Run Fiscal Development
This paper exploits an original database that spans 30-plus developed and developing nations between 1870 and 2010 to perform the first empirical analysis of the relationship between historical levels of intra-elite competition and fiscal development over the long run. We argue that the timing of industrialization affects the extent of historical competition between agricultural and capitalist elites, which in turn helps shape key initial decisio…
Taxing work
This article examines the development of tax regimes across OECD countries in the latter part of the twentieth century. It gives particular emphasis to taxes on labour income. Taxes on labour income represent a major drain on private households. They have become the mainstay of many of these countries’ public sector finances. Taxes on labour income rather than on capital appear to be the preferred instrument of finance for those economic and poli…
Diverse Disparities: The Politics and Economics of Wage, Market, and Disposable Income Inequalities
It is widely thought that among the countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), income inequality has become more widespread over the past decades. The authors show that this image is misleading. The OECD countries remain more diverse in their distributions of labor earnings and disposable income than they are in their distributions of market income. The larger and persistent cross-national variation in the dis…
The Behavioral Foundations of Social Politics: Evidence from Surveys and a Laboratory Democracy
The dominant theoretical approaches in the comparative political economy of the welfare state provide alternative accounts for why some governments spend more on social policies than others. In the first, poor voters seek to increase their current income by taxing the rich, and social policy serves to redistribute income from the rich to the poor. In the second account, voters seek social insurance against future job loss, and social policy serve…
The Political Geography of the Eurocrisis
The European Union provided a mixed response to the 2008 financial crisis. On the one hand, it refused to pursue fiscal integration through a common budget; on the other, it introduced significant transfers between countries that were designed to produce financial stabilization. The authors analyze this response as the outcome of democratic constraints on EU leaders. Given the EU’s current institutional structure, citizens’ preferences pose a bin…
Inequality and Institutions: The Case of Economic Coordination
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 ce…
Democracy under High Inequality: Capacity, Spending, and Participation
Contrary to the view that inequality reduces turnout, political participation among low-income voters is higher in democracies with high levels of inequality and intermediate levels of state capacity. We address this puzzle by analyzing the link between political mobilization and spending decisions at different levels of inequality and state capacity. Under high inequality and low levels of capacity, parties find it optimal to mobilize low-income…
Multi-modes for Detecting Experimental Measurement Error
Experiments should be designed to facilitate the detection of experimental measurement error. To this end, we advocate the implementation of identical experimental protocols employing diverse experimental modes. We suggest iterative nonparametric estimation techniques for assessing the magnitude of heterogeneous treatment effects across these modes. And we propose two diagnostic strategies—measurement metrics embedded in experiments, and measurem…
The Electoral Effects of Large-Scale Infrastructure Policies: Evidence from a Rural Electrification Scheme in Brazil
This paper analyzes the conditions under which major infrastructural investments generate electoral returns. It addresses when and how the constraints imposed by myopic voters under democracy can be overcome. We argue that sustained policy spillovers are critical to broadening the pool of beneficiaries and yielding significant returns to the incumbent in the medium to long run. We make this case by analyzing Luz para Todos (LPT)-- a large-scale r…
Fiscal decentralization and the distributive incidence of the Great Recession
This paper argues that fiscal decentralization is one important explanation for variation in distributive outcomes following the Great Recession. Using a difference-in-differences approach, it examines how fiscal decentralization mediated the link between spatial distribution, redistributive effort and interpersonal inequality in 21 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries in the years following the Great Recession.…
Political decentralisation and the spatial distribution of infant mortality in less developed nations
This paper focuses on political decentralisation as an institutional determinant of the level and spatial distribution of infant mortality rates (IMR). At the national level, we show that political decentralisation is linked to lower IMR, but these benefits are concentrated in high-income decentralised nations. In developing nations, decentralisation is associated with significantly higher spatial variation in IMR. We explore the mechanisms drivi…
Polarization and Accountability in Covid Times
We analyze the relationship between accountability and polarization in the context of the COVID crisis. We make three points. First, when voters perceive the out-party to be ideologically extreme, they are less likely to hold incumbents accountable for poor outcomes via competence-based evaluations. Knowing this, even in the context of major crises, incumbents face weaker incentives to take politically costly measures that would minimize deaths. …
Comparative political studies
Taxing Work: Some Political and Economic Aspects of Labor Income Taxation
Taxing work
This article examines the development of tax regimes across OECD countries in the latter part of the twentieth century. It gives particular emphasis to taxes on labour income. Taxes on labour income represent a major drain on private households. They have become the mainstay of many of these countries’ public sector finances. Taxes on labour income rather than on capital appear to be the preferred instrument of finance for those economic and poli…
Inequality and the Territorial Fragmentation of Solidarity
A long tradition of research has shown decentralized political structures as an important cause behind lower levels of redistribution and higher levels of inequality. This article offers an alternative interpretation of the association between fragmented fiscal structures and higher levels of inequality. I argue that the distributive effects of decentralization depend on the preexisting territorial patterns of inequality. Therefore, the political…
Social Democracy Constrained: Indirect Taxation in Industrialized Democracies
The determinants of the welfare state have received a great deal of attention in the comparative political economy literature. An analysis of the role that indirect taxation plays in the politics of advanced industrial societies is, however, missing. This article demonstrates that a full understanding of the links between redistribution, social democracy and corporatism is impossible without a closer look at indirect taxation. Conventional wisdom…
Diverse Disparities: The Politics and Economics of Wage, Market, and Disposable Income Inequalities
It is widely thought that among the countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), income inequality has become more widespread over the past decades. The authors show that this image is misleading. The OECD countries remain more diverse in their distributions of labor earnings and disposable income than they are in their distributions of market income. The larger and persistent cross-national variation in the dis…
The Political Geography of Inequality: Regions and Redistribution
This book addresses two questions - why some political systems have more centralized systems of interpersonal redistribution than others, and why some political unions make larger efforts to equalize resources among their constituent units than others. This book presents a new theory of the origin of fiscal structures in systems with several levels of government. The argument points to two major factors to account for the variation in redistribut…
Left Parties, Poor Voters, and Electoral Participation in Advanced Industrial Societies
Although income inequality is an important normative issue for students of democratic politics, little is known about its effects on citizens’ electoral participation. The authors develop a formal model of the incentives for left parties to mobilize lower income voters. It posits that countries’ income distributions and competition on the left provide different incentives for left parties to mobilize lower income voters. In the absence of politic…
The Behavioral Foundations of Social Politics: Evidence from Surveys and a Laboratory Democracy
The dominant theoretical approaches in the comparative political economy of the welfare state provide alternative accounts for why some governments spend more on social policies than others. In the first, poor voters seek to increase their current income by taxing the rich, and social policy serves to redistribute income from the rich to the poor. In the second account, voters seek social insurance against future job loss, and social policy serve…
Inequality and Institutions: The Case of Economic Coordination
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 ce…
Constrained Partisanship and Economic Outcomes
The relative autonomy of politics, to use an expression slightly out of fashion, as a determinant of social and economic outcomes is yet again in the eye of the beholder. While some see processes such as globalization, deindustrialization, and more recently the Great Recession as a sign of structural factors overruling the ability of incumbents to pursue their agenda and shape the distribution of winners and losers across society, others see the …
Introduction: The Politics of Advanced Capitalism
In the concluding chapter of the 1999 volume Continuity and Change in Contemporary Capitalism, the then-editors affirmed that the most challenging part of the characterization of contemporary capitalism is to determine "how the cross-sectional patterns of variation, locked in through intricate pathways of industrialization and democratization, are shaped by growing global interdependence and domestic political and socioeconomic change" (Kitschelt…
Politics of Advanced Capitalism
The Politics of Advanced Capitalism
This book serves as a sequel to two distinguished volumes on capitalism: Continuity and Change in Contemporary Capitalism (Cambridge, 1999) and Order and Conflict in Contemporary Capitalism (1985). Both volumes took stock of major economic challenges advanced industrial democracies faced, as well as the ways political and economic elites dealt with them. However, during the last decades, the structural environment of advanced capitalist democraci…
Globalization, Public Finance, and Poverty
Global economic forces might impact poverty in any number of direct ways—by reducing prices, providing access to larger pools of capital, or creating and destroying jobs. Such forces might also work indirectly, that is, through their effect on labor standards, unionization rates, or the development of labor-saving technology. In this research note, we emphasize the impact of “globalization” on the poor via the path of public finances. This is a t…
Who Gives, Who Gains? Progressivity and Preferences
The extent to which popular support for the welfare state depends on income varies greatly across nations and policy domains. We argue and show formally that these variations—largely overlooked yet essential to understanding the politics of redistribution—reflect in part the design of tax and transfer policies in terms of progressivity. When progressivity is high, politics is perceived by income groups as a zero sum game and conflicts over who ge…
Barriers to Egalitarianism: Distributive Tensions in Latin American Federations
Latin America’s largest federations have significantly reduced their levels of income inequality in recent years, perhaps reflecting a structural change toward egalitarianism. However, we argue that the political geography of federalism in Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico strongly shapes preferences against centralized redistribution likely to promote equity in the long term. While federalism does not necessary lead to lower redistribution in theory…
Economic Geography, Political Inequality, and Public Goods in the Original 13 U.S. States
A large and fruitful literature has focused on the impact of colonial legacies on long-term development. Yet the mechanisms through which these legacies get transmitted over time remain ambiguous. This article analyzes the choice and effects of legislative representation as one such mechanism, driven by elites interested in maximizing jointly economic prospects and political influence over time. We focus on malapportionment in the legislatures of…
Fiscal decentralization and the distributive incidence of the Great Recession
This paper argues that fiscal decentralization is one important explanation for variation in distributive outcomes following the Great Recession. Using a difference-in-differences approach, it examines how fiscal decentralization mediated the link between spatial distribution, redistributive effort and interpersonal inequality in 21 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries in the years following the Great Recession.…
Intra-Elite Competition and Long-Run Fiscal Development
This paper exploits an original database that spans 30-plus developed and developing nations between 1870 and 2010 to perform the first empirical analysis of the relationship between historical levels of intra-elite competition and fiscal development over the long run. We argue that the timing of industrialization affects the extent of historical competition between agricultural and capitalist elites, which in turn helps shape key initial decisio…
The Political Geography of the Eurocrisis
The European Union provided a mixed response to the 2008 financial crisis. On the one hand, it refused to pursue fiscal integration through a common budget; on the other, it introduced significant transfers between countries that were designed to produce financial stabilization. The authors analyze this response as the outcome of democratic constraints on EU leaders. Given the EU’s current institutional structure, citizens’ preferences pose a bin…
Democracy under High Inequality: Capacity, Spending, and Participation
Contrary to the view that inequality reduces turnout, political participation among low-income voters is higher in democracies with high levels of inequality and intermediate levels of state capacity. We address this puzzle by analyzing the link between political mobilization and spending decisions at different levels of inequality and state capacity. Under high inequality and low levels of capacity, parties find it optimal to mobilize low-income…
Multi-modes for Detecting Experimental Measurement Error
Experiments should be designed to facilitate the detection of experimental measurement error. To this end, we advocate the implementation of identical experimental protocols employing diverse experimental modes. We suggest iterative nonparametric estimation techniques for assessing the magnitude of heterogeneous treatment effects across these modes. And we propose two diagnostic strategies—measurement metrics embedded in experiments, and measurem…
Geography, Capacity, and Inequality: Spatial Inequality
In this Element, we investigate how economic geography, the distribution of subnational economic endowments within a nation, shapes long-run patterns of inequality through its impact on the development of fiscal capacity. We present an argument that links economic geography to capacity through different types of industrialization processes. We show how early industrializers shape spatial distributions domestically by investing in productivity acr…
Polarization and Accountability in Covid Times
We analyze the relationship between accountability and polarization in the context of the COVID crisis. We make three points. First, when voters perceive the out-party to be ideologically extreme, they are less likely to hold incumbents accountable for poor outcomes via competence-based evaluations. Knowing this, even in the context of major crises, incumbents face weaker incentives to take politically costly measures that would minimize deaths. …
Economics (26 works) · Political science (25 works) · Politics (23 works) · Social Policy and Reform Studies (14 works) · Inequality (13 works) · Market economy (11 works) · Political economy (10 works) · Law (9 works) · Local Government Finance and Decentralization (9 works) · Economic system (8 works)