FR requires taxes and spending.
Melissa Rogers 16, Associate Professor of Political Science and Co-Director of the Inequality and Policy Research Center at Claremont Graduate University, Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego, 2016, “The Politics of Place and the Limits to Redistribution,” Routledge Advances in International Relations and Global Politics, ISBN: 978-0-203-54529-4
A bounty of research also addresses the relationship between income inequality and political outcomes, especially fiscal redistribution. As I have explained, these works almost always conceptualize and measure inequality at the individual level, aggregated to one national indicator. I focus additionally on the relationship between interregional inequality and fiscal redistribution. I define fiscal redistribution as the efforts made by the government through taxes and spending to equalize income. In Figure 1.2, I show a snapshot of the relationship between interregional inequality and fiscal redistribution in 2010. Fiscal redistribution is measured by the percentage reduction in the national Gini coefficient of individual income inequality that results from government policies (Solt 2014). The relationship is quite clearly negative; that is, countries with higher interregional inequality also tend to have lower fiscal redistribution. This statistical relationship is very strong, as I will discuss in detail in the next chapter. This book is an effort to link the empirical observations in Figures 1.1 and 1.2 to a theory of political representation.