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led to an expansion in both social insurance and public education provision. This
assertion is also supported by the work of Bueno de Mesquita, et al. (2003), who
demonstrate that as the size of the winning coalition in a regime increases, so do
important education and health indicators.
The extent of redistribution in democracies is clearly dependent on certain
constraints, as a large literature has investigated. Some of these constraints that have
been analyzed in the literature include the political mobilization of the rich, electoral
funding laws, and the mobility of capital. And in fact, these constraints play a critical
role in theories of regime change based on redistribution. In the Acemoglu and Robinson
framework, for example, the reason democracies fall is because the threat of
redistribution is too much for the rich, who launch a coup. In the Boix framework, the
mobility of capital makes democracy more likely, because the rich—able to move their
money abroad—are not as afraid of the redistributive power of democracies. For these
reasons, democracies in these frameworks maximize redistribution to a certain point, at
which the rich are just indifferent between being in a democracy and launching a coup.
Dictatorships redistribute for a different reason. If one assumes that those in
power in a dictatorship are generally the more well-off in a society, then it is a quick
jump to understand that they will want as little redistribution as possible. However, like
democracies, dictatorships also work under certain constraints. One of the most
important of these is the potential for revolution from the large portion of society not in
power—the poorer portion. While there is far less empirical work studying redistribution
in dictatorships than in democracies, many scholars (e.g. Acemoglu and Robinson 2005;
Acemoglu, et al. 2004; Grossman 1991; 1994; Huntington 1968) have theorized that an
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