The puzzle at the center of Ekrem Karakoç’s book is the rising levels of inequality after democratization in southern and postcommunist Europe. For most readers of this journal, this may not be much of a puzzle. Communist regimes were among the most egalitarian in the world and the economic reforms pursued after the fall of communism, such as price liberalization and enterprise privatization, were very likely to increase inequality by allowing those at the top to enrich themselves and taking away securities from those at the bottom. Puzzle solved.

One of the main models of taxation and redistribution used by economists and political scientists, however—the Melzer-Richard model—predicts that democracies should have quite high levels of redistribution and hence low levels of inequality. The intuition is fairly simply though the book does not lay it out in detail. Because majorities rule in democracies (or at least in this model), and the typical or median voter has a lower income than average (due to outliers like Jeff Bezos), the majority gains by voting to redistribute wealth. Karakoç argues that one can test the model by looking at countries that democratize. If democracy produces high levels of redistribution, then democratizing countries like those in southern and postcommunist Europe should see a decline in inequality after democratization. Hence the puzzle that inequality has risen in many of these countries.

The heart of the book presents an explanation for these trends. In the first place, not all citizens vote and non-voting is often concentrated among the poor, which means that governments will be more responsive to the rich than to the poorer majority. Second, high levels of electoral volatility—voters’ tendency to switch between parties and to prefer new parties over existing ones—means that parties have an incentive to favor (or target) organized social groups that are part of their base rather than appeal to the median voter. Because this spending is targeted it counterintuitively worsens inequality. Karakoç provides evidence for this argument first with statistical analyses of the relationships between turnout, volatility, targeted spending, and inequality across Europe and second with paired case studies of the Czech Republic and Poland, and Spain and Turkey that look in more detail at the posited relationships.

While the argument is clear and well-organized and the evidence detailed, it does suffer from a number of flaws. I will focus mainly on the postcommunist part of the sample, which constitutes thirteen of the seventeen democratizing cases. In the first place, the implications of the Melzer-Richard model do not apply well to the postcommunist transition because these countries had some of the lowest levels of inequality in the world. This made it almost inevitable that inequality would rise after the transition. Indeed, in the statistical analysis, it is possible that the significant results are being driven by the enormous changes in postcommunist countries that used to have no electoral volatility and 99% voter turnout in addition to very low levels of inequality. The small number of observations exacerbates the problem.

Both the statistical analysis and the case studies focus mostly on the determinants of levels of targeted spending, defined mainly in terms of pension expenditures. Karakoç does not provide a strong justification for this conceptualization of targeted spending or its importance for inequality. Given that retirees usually have low incomes, more spending on pensions, even targeted spending, should reduce inequality. Furthermore, the author leaves out other drivers of inequality, like economic reforms or taxation. My a priori hunch would be that changes in inequality are driven as much by structural changes in the economy as by political dynamics related to elections. More detail on when and where changes in inequality occurred would help to adjudicate between these explanations.

In sum, the book presents a clever account of what may be a puzzling rise in inequality in democratizing countries in Europe, though I was not ultimately persuaded of its correctness. It is more convincing as a study of the drivers of pension spending. The book may be a bit rough-going for those not familiar with the literatures it is drawing on, and the level of detail can be at once far too dense (the two case-study chapters are eighty pages and 110 pages, respectively, and focus more on variables than narrative) and too sparse (lack of detail about the evolution of inequality or the conceptualization of targeted spending). The work does provide a considerable amount of detail on social policy changes, however, which may spur others to additional work on the topic.