price shock can redistribute market incomes within a country, triggering both redistribution and government and party instability. To control for the possible spurious effects of common global shocks, the fourth set of results controls for the year in which the income data were collected. This has no influence on the results.

More generally, a potential endogeneity bias emerges if an unobserved shock in a country triggers both the creation of a left-wing party and increased demand for redistribution. This would lead to a spurious association between young left-wing parties and high redistribution. In fact, there are only a handful of observations (nine) in which the left-wing government party is five years old or younger. The last set of results in Table 5 omits these observations from the specification and the results are unchanged.

We undertook one final set of robustness checks (not reported), to take into account the possibility that the error terms in each pair of regressions, on the top and bottom quintiles, could be correlated. To the extent that this is the case, the proper estimation methodology is seeminglyunrelated regressions. All of our results remain unchanged, or strengthen, when we jointly estimate the top and bottom quintile regressions with SUR.

# Partisan effects and taxation: using a different database

The analysis of household income offers obvious advantages in the study of redistribution. However, these data do not allow us to trace the effects of partisan variables on any specific public policies associated with redistribution. One of these, for which substantial data exist, is taxation. If left-wing parties redistribute more, they should also tax more. Moreover, if older left-wing parties are more sensitive to the long-run costs of redistribution, which emerge largely from taxation, they should tax less. Table 6 uses taxation data from the _World Development Indicators_ and presents evidence consistent with both of these propositions across more than 100 countries with competitive elections.

The base specification in column one includes the same control variables as in Table 2 and, as in Table 2, controls for country fixed effects. Consistent with the argument throughout this paper, but with an entirely different set of data, left-wing governments tax more heavily, but older, left-wing governments tax less. Column 2 controls for electoral variables and political system. Countries with larger district magnitudes (almost all of which are PR systems) tax more heavily; there is no difference between presidential and parliamentary systems, nor any additional differences between systems with proportional and plurality electoral systems. The presence of these controls has no effect on the estimated influence on taxation of left-wing governments and the age of governing left-wing parties.

These results constitute a useful illustration of the policy mechanisms through which party effects operate to generate the redistributive results in the earlier tables. However, a full-fledged analysis of tax effects requires detailed information on the tax structure of countries – whether, for example, younger left-wing governments not only tax more heavily, but also choose more or less efficient tax modalities; and whether they impose higher taxes on the rich, or collect significant revenues from broad-based sales taxes. These data are not available. For some countries, data distinguish tax revenues collected from taxes on goods and services versus taxes on income, for example, but without information on rates and exemptions, few conclusions can be drawn about efficiency and incidence.

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