Red states, blue states, and the welfare state: geography rules!

The divide of “Red states, blue states” exists not only in the UnitedStates, but almost everywhere in the democratic free world. It is also true in every country that liberal parties always concentrate their support in urban areas, even in countries where urban areas are in much richer than rural areas. Another stylized fact we always observe is that in countries that adopt plurality electoral rule as opposed to proportionate representation electoral rule, socialist candidates are less likely to take power.

Why is it so? Professor Jonathan Rodden (MIT) provides an explanation based on economic geography. By economic of scale and agglomeration economy, it is natural that manufacturing bases always cluster together and form what will be later called urban metropolitan areas. Workers, who reside in these urban areas are more likely to be mobilized around a redistribution agenda. This is why liberal parties have to rely on urban voters.

Business interests in some countries, when they extended franchise to workers more than 100 years ago, however build a safeguard in the electoral system to prevent socialists and communists from taking power. This safeguard is the so-called “plurality electoral rule” and “small single-member electoral district”.

Because workers are concentrated in urban areas, pro-redistribution candidates usually have a lot of surplus vote in urban area. Single-member districts however make it difficult for workers (who are usually concentrated in small number of urban districts) to translate votes into seats, because a victory with 30% margin or 5% margin is not different when it comes to allocation of seats.

Another geography law that goes against leftist parties is that, in single-member district system, for a party to win, the pivotal voter is the median voter in the median district (which happens to be suburban area), who are usually politically to the right of the national median voter. If the leftist party wants to win over this voter by moving their platform to the right, another more fundamentalist leftist party will enter from the far left to steal away lefties votes; If it doesn’t move to the right, however, it will never win a majority. This creates a dilemma and a mission impossible for leftist parties.

In many continental European countries, proportionate representation (PR) electoral rule combined with multi-member large electoral districts, however, help workers to pull together their votes. This is why in these countries, socialist pro-redistribution candidates are more likely to be elected. Professor Rodden predict that, in two otherwise identical countries, the one that uses single-member district plurality electoral rule will less likely to develop a redistribution welfare state.

As a matter of fact, in the UnitedStates, we can also observe the effects of the two different electoral systems. Electoral districts for the House of Senate are state-wide and combine rural, urban and suburban areas. Workers in urban states thus can effectively translate their numbers into seats, and pro-redistribution Senate candidates are more likely to be elected. This is why in U.S. Senate, although rural states by design are overrepresented, the political orientation is still biased to the left compared to the House of Congress where congressmen are elected from small single-member districts.

Reference:

Jonathan Rodden: Read states, blue states, and the welfare states (PDF file)

Edward Glaeser: Myths and Realities of American Political Geography (PDF file)