Social benefit programs are related but NOT equivalent to fiscal redistribution.
David Jesuit & Vincent Mahler 4, Jesuit is with the Department of Political Science & Public Administration, Central Michigan University; Mahler is with the Department of Political Science, Loyola University Chicago, “State Redistribution in Comparative Perspective: A Cross-National Analysis of the Developed Countries,” Luxembourg Income Study Working Paper Series, Working Paper No. 392, November 2004, https://www.lisdatacenter.org/wps/liswps/392.pdf
In exploring these traditions empirically, we will introduce six variables, two representing each of the three explanatory traditions. Perhaps the most commonly addressed question from a power resources perspective is whether the partisan orientation of national governments is an important determinant of the extent of fiscal redistribution. Despite several decades of intensive work on this topic, the verdict is still in doubt. While a number of empirical studies have found support for the importance of partisanship, others have found little or no relationship. One reason for this lack of consensus may be that in nearly all of the empirical work on the topic the dependent variable is not fiscal redistribution per se but rather the size of social benefit programs relative to the economy. In measuring the partisan orientation of national governments, we employ a measure of “cabinet balance” (from Armingeon et al., 2004) that classifies national cabinets in a given year on a 5-point scale ranging from hegemony of right-wing parties (1) to hegemony of left wing parties (5).