Bernard Grofman (“Seven Durable Axes of Cleavage in Political Science,” in Kristen Monroe, ed., Contemporary Empirical Political Theory, 1997) has suggested that game theory may become as central to political science as calculus is to physics. This may be seen in the growth of “soft rational choice” work that uses game theory as a language for discussing strategic interaction, and also in the increased use of game theoretic metaphors in a wide variety of fields. If this is so, Rosa Mulé's book is a good example of this trend. It consists of a series of analytic narratives explaining changes in income inequality in terms of the strategic interactions of party elites.

Mulé seeks to explain the (generally inegalitarian) changes in income distribution that took place in advanced industrial democracies in the 1980s and 1990s. Using data from the Luxembourg income study, she dismisses the idea that these changes in inequality are simply a result of market condition, as the level and direction of change vary by countries and are largely the result of changes in government transfers. She also dismisses simple versions of the most common sociological and rational choice explanations. Whether or not inequality increases cannot be explained in terms of parties representing specific classes, as in some cases, parties identified with the working class presided over increasing inequality. Neither do rational choice theories based on electoral processes favoring the median income voter, or being driven by the political business cycle, fit the evidence. Instead, Mulé argues that the changes in inequality result from strategic calculations made by elites, particularly in regard to intraparty politics.

The core of the book is four case studies, considering Canada, Australia, the UK, and the United States. In the case of Canada, we learn that Pierre Trudeau used the electoral threat from the Left, posed by the NDP (New Democratic Party) in the 1970s, to embark on a redistributive strategy that marginalized the probusiness, antiwelfarist wing of the Liberal Party. However, once this faction was no longer a threat, Trudeau moved the party back toward the center. Similarly in Australia, Bob Hawke used economic and welfare state retrenchment to redefine the Labor Party (“New Labor”) and marginalize the Left, although the changes in income distribution were relatively slight. Mulé argues that the adoption of monetarism and welfare cuts under Margaret Thatcher in the UK had as much to do with redefining the Conservative Party and its style of politics as it did with economic imperatives. Finally, she interprets Bill Clinton's endorsement of the ending of national entitlement to welfare in 1996 in terms of an underlying strategy to redefine the Democratic Party. The case studies are impressive and well documented, although some of the interpretations—particularly, I suspect, the U.S. case—are likely to provoke controversy.

The research design is justified (p. 14) as a most-similar-systems analysis, comparing four countries with liberal welfare states and relatively high inequality. Given that the dependent variable is change in inequality over time and not the level of inequality, this does not have the result of eliminating the variance to be explained—the increase in inequality in the period covered was significant in the UK and the United States, marginal in Australia, and slightly negative in Canada. However, the research design does have significant costs in terms of the conclusions that can be drawn. Because the study only considers four countries with high inequality, it cannot say much about why inequality varies between countries, but can only talk about changes at the margin. Some rival hypotheses, such as the claim that policy is oriented to the median voter, really make claims about the outcome on average, not about marginal changes. In addition, consideration of institutional variables such as electoral systems is impossible, as these are similar across all cases.

There is no single game theoretic model driving the study. Indeed, there is no theory section that lays out a deductive model, but rather the modeling is deployed as needed in a reconstructive, interpretive manner to explain the strategic choices the players made. The models are precise and accessible and add clarity to the argument—game theory is a natural language to use when talking about strategic interaction. The only partial exception is the model of blackmail politics in Canada on pages 69–70, which attempts to deploy the portfolio allocation model of Michael Laver and Kenneth Shepsle (“Government Coalitions and Intraparty Politics,” British Journal of Political Science 20 [1990]: 489–507) when a far simpler pivotal voter model is implied in the narrative. The logic of the model in the narrative, however, is quite convincing.

Political Parties, Games, and Redistribution does an impressive job of arguing that the observed changes in government policy and income distribution can only be understood in terms of intraparty power struggles, and not simply as a result of economic imperatives or party competition. As such, it fits well with a growing body of recent work in both comparative politics and formal theory that emphasizes the importance of internal party politics. It also does an extremely thorough job of dealing with the very complex methodological issues involved in measuring inequality, a fact easily underestimated unless you read the technical addendum. It has difficulty, however, drawing more general conclusions than the fact that intraparty politics drives outcomes. For example, it is argued that the formation of new factions, the consolidation of new factions, or the demise of factions can lead to new policies (egalitarian or inegalitarian) that redefine the identity of a party (pp. 196–98). Of course, it is rather unfair to ask the author to produce a theory that can explain the short-term changes in the redistributive policies that parties pursue. This is in all likelihood a highly stochastic, unpredictable process, driven by complex dynamics that cannot be explained but only described. This book does do an excellent job of providing a compelling description of these processes.