Politics, Altruism, and the Definition of Poverty

25 Pages Posted: 23 Aug 2014

Date Written: August 22, 1999

Abstract

The history of poverty lines suggests that they are determined jointly with poverty policy in the same political game. If the definition of poverty is endogenous, however, why do altruistic voters allow poverty to persist indefinitely, as seems to be the case in real life? A simple redistribution model shows that the persistence of poverty imposes fairly strong restrictions on the nature of voter altruism. Specifically, a voter's compassion for the poor must rise as the defined severity of the poverty problem worsens. Given such preferences, political actors face incentives to define poverty as a severe problem and then to use redistribution to reduce it significantly. There is no direct incentive to eliminate poverty, however; indeed, voters may prefer a state in which policy always attacks poverty vigorously and yet never defeats it. It follows that social policy should not be judged by its success in eliminating poverty, which may be directly counter to voter interests and therefore practically impossible. Rather, we should ask whether poverty policy provides enough help to people whom voters currently consider to be poor.

Keywords: poverty, poverty lines, altruism, redistribution

JEL Classification: I3

Suggested Citation

Castronova, Edward, Politics, Altruism, and the Definition of Poverty (August 22, 1999). Edward J. Bird (1999) Politics, altruism, and the definition of poverty, Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis: Research and Practice, 1:3, 269-291, DOI: 10.1080/13876989908412628, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2485405

Edward Castronova (Contact Author)

Indiana University ( email )

107 S Indiana Ave
100 South Woodlawn
Bloomington, IN 47405
United States

Do you have negative results from your research you’d like to share?

Paper statistics

Downloads
61
Abstract Views
680
Rank
643,103
PlumX Metrics