Do Politicians Serve the One Percent? Evidence in OECD Countries

Pablo Torija Jiménez

CITYPERC Working Paper Series from Department of International Politics, City University London

Abstract: Present social movements, as "Occupy Wall Street" or the Spanish "Indignados", claim that politicians work for an economic elite, the 1%, that drives the world economic policies. In this paper we show through econometric analysis that these movements are accurate: politicians in OECD countries maximize the happiness of the economic elite. In 2009 center-right parties maximized the happiness of the 100th-98th richest percentile and center-left parties the 100th-95th richest percentile. The situation has evolved from the seventies when politicians represented, approximately, the median voter.

Date: 2013
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-pke and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: Track citations by RSS feed

Downloads: (external link)
https://openaccess.city.ac.uk/id/eprint/2114/1/CITYPERC-WPS-2013_04.pdf

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:dip:dpaper:2013-04

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CITYPERC Working Paper Series from Department of International Politics, City University London Department of International Politics, Social Sciences Building, City University London, Whiskin Street, London, EC1R 0JD, United Kingdom. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Research Publications Librarian ().