The Politics of Redistribution: A Reformulation

Abstract

This paper offers a critique and a reformulation of Brian Fry and Richard Winters's policy output study published in this Review June, 1970. Fry and Winters focused on the redistributive impact of public policy in the states. After devising a “redistribution ratio” that involves allocating state revenue burdens and expenditure benefits to families across income classes, they developed a model to explain the variance of this ratio from state to state. In contrast to the findings of many earlier policy output studies, they hypothesized that political variables would have more explanatory power than socioeconomic variables.Unfortunately some methodological shortcomings detract from the potential value of the Fry and Winters study. In this paper, alternative methodologies are used to reformulate a redistribution ratio for each state, and the recalculated ratios are found to vary significantly from those obtained by Fry and Winters.The shortcomings of the Fry and Winters explanatory model are discussed. Despite these shortcomings, however, the regression analysis employed by Fry and Winters is repeated using the reformulated redistribution ratios in order to test the impact of this reformulation. Again the results obtained in this paper vary substantially from those of Fry and Winters.