Distributional Consequences of Political Freedom

This article addresses the origins of income inequality in post-socialist countries from Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia, from 1991 to 2016. The aim is to analyze the relationship between democracy and income inequality. In previous studies, this topic has led to ambiguous findings, especially in the context of the group of countries we are focusing on. We examine whether the process of democratization co-occurred with changes in income distribution over the entire period under study, and its impact on individual income deciles to determine who benefited most from the new system. The obtained results allowed us to confirm that the actual relationship between democratization and income inequality did not exist, or at most was illusory in the 1990s, but it was present, relevant, and had a pro-equality character between 2001 and 2016. During that period, the development of the democratic system benefited at least 80% of the lower part of the income distribution, at the expense especially of the top decile’s share of total income. Those results confirmed that democratization positively affected the shares of lower income deciles in post-socialist countries.