policymakers demonstrate

Inequality and Welfare: Is Europe Special? 529
0.6
South
Liberal Conservative
0.4
0.2
0.0
–0.2
–0.4
Republicans
South
North
North
–0.6
Democrats
1879
1893 1907 1921 1935 1949 1963 1977 1991 2005
Figure 12.7 Republican–Democrat distance on Liberal–Conservative Dimension
for the US House of Representatives, 1879–2012 (Bonica et al., 2013).
system requires to some extent a consensus, or at least moderate representatives
from the other political side (because of the bicameral legislature
with a filibuster) to pass laws, the polarization has created a policy gridlock
preventing the US system from adopting redistributive policies to maintain disposable
inequality in a moderate range.
The next issue is to understand why such of polarization happens and why
after all redistribution policies become less popular. It is maybe the most difficult
issue of social sciences to establish some causal relations about why political
stances are becoming more or less popular. John Roemer (Roemer et al.,
2007) hypotheses that instead of being one dimensional (more or less welfare
state), the political agenda is nowadays bi-dimensional, where the second political
axis is how open the society should be to people originating from other ethnicities.
The choice along this second dimension interferes with the choice over
the redistributive dimension and changes the equilibrium of the political game.
If people of the ethnic majority have the feeling (maybe it is untrue) that the
welfare recipients come in a disproportionate fraction from the minorities, some
voters will be against an extension of the welfare state and even for a reduction
of the welfare state because of their mixed feelings vis-à-vis the minority. The
authors estimate that if all voters held nonracist views, liberal and conservative
parties alike would have proposed levels of redistribution 10–20 per cent
higher than they did. On European data (ESS), Senik et al. (2009) found that
natives that hold negative views about immigrants tend to be less supportive
of the welfare state independently of the perceived presence of immigrants. To
the extent that the racial issue used to be less intense in Europe than in the US,