Democracy, Redistribution, and Political Participation: Evidence From Sweden 1919-1938
利用瑞典地方政府的人口阈值进行断点回归，发现直接民主比代议民主在普选后对公共福利支出少40-60%，表明直接民主可能更容易被精英俘获。
In this paper, we compare how two different types of political regimes—direct versus representative democracy—redistribute income toward the relatively poor segments of society after the introduction of universal and equal suffrage. Swedish local governments are used as a testing ground since this setting offers a number of attractive features for a credible impact evaluation. Most importantly, we exploit the existence of a population threshold, which partly determined a local government's choice of democracy to implement a regression-discontinuity design. The results indicate that direct democracies spend 40–60 percent less on public welfare. Our interpretation is that direct democracy may be more prone to elite capture than representative democracy since the elite's potential to exercise de facto power is likely to be greater in direct democracy after democratization.