Students, faculty, and members of the Memorial Univeristy are inivited to join us for a presentation and disussison with Dr. Olivier Jacques (U de Montreal) as part of the Department of Political Science's  ongoing speaker series.

"Income Decline and the Political Backlash Against Advanced Welfare State"

Across advanced capitalist democracies, many households’ real incomes have stagnated or fell in the last few decades, with substantial economic consequences. In this article we explore the political consequences of this phenomenon and argue that widespread income decline leads to a political backlash against the taxes necessary to fund welfare states. We develop a model where taxes are a mechanism to sacrifice current for future consumption: falling incomes make individuals discount their future more, thereby reducing their support for taxes. Using panel data and longitudinal repeated cross-sectional data from the United States, Canada, Japan, Norway, Switzerland, and comparative surveys, we find that various measures of economic decline are robustly associated with lower support for taxation and welfare spending. Furthermore, we show that income decline is associated with higher support for spending cuts and electoral support for governments implementing these cuts. Thus, long-term income decline undermines the political foundations of welfare states.

---

Location: SN 2033

Date and Time: Wednesday, Jun. 11 at 02:00 PM - 03:30 PM (NDT)

---