Income-based voting and polarization over redistribution under alternative electoral systems

•I create a novel measure of income-based voting.•I test macro-level theories of the effects of electoral systems on redistribution with micro-level data.•I find robust support for more proportionality leading to more income-based voting.

Democracies that have proportional electoral systems spend substantively more on welfare policies than those that have majoritarian systems. Theoretical accounts of this empirical regularity are generally tested using macro-level data, leaving micro-level implications untested. In this paper, I take an alternative approach, leveraging the fact that the theories in question make predictions about the electoral coordination between parties and voters around broad-based redistribution under alternative institutional arrangements. To test the theories, I create a novel measure of income-based voting, which captures the sensitivity of vote choice to changes in income and forms the dependent variable in a second stage model. Overall, I find robust support for more proportionality leading to more income-based voting.