Instituciones politicas y desigualdad de renta: el caso de la descentralizacion

In: Revista española de ciencia política, Issue 10, p. 81-110

Abstract

Political power is being reallocated across territorial boundaries. This paper analyzes how such process interacts with the politics of redistribution & inequality. In this paper it is argued that whatever the impact of decentralization on the distribution of income may be, it depends to a large extent on the internal structures of inequality within regions & their combination. This being the case, there are reasons to believe that, in the context of multilevel governance, contentions about the allocation of power across levels of governments become to a large extent contentions about who gets what. Such contentions make decentralization endogenous to the territorial structure of inequality by virtue of a political process linking the latter to the preferences about the territorial design of redistribution. The first part of the paper formalizes this argument. The second one tests it against a data set of 15 OECD countries over the period 1980-1997. Tables, Figures, References. Adapted from the source document.