Does Voting for the Winner Make Your Group Better Off? How Vote Choice Affects (Relative) Group Income & Wellbeing Growth in the United Kingdom

The current empirical literature on distributive politics within
advanced democracies focuses on answering variants of the
following question - which areas do governments favour
when making expenditure decisions? In this project, I
combine this traditional empirical strategy with a different
approach, where I analyse whether the voting behaviour of
different groups (defined by characteristics such as income,
age etc.) determines the extent to which governments
favour them when making distributive decisions. In particular,
I examine whether groups who voted for the government at
the last election, or who could be persuaded to vote for the
government at the next election, are also the beneficiaries of
distributive decisions that enhance their income and
wellbeing. By exploiting the discontinuities around general
elections, I identify the causal effect of changes in the
composition of (persuadable) voters on changes to taxation,
social security policies and well-being. Finally, I implement an
inequality decomposition to estimate how much of the
income and wellbeing inequality between groups can be
explained by changes in the composition of (persuadable)
voters