Paradoxes of social policy: Welfare transfers, relative poverty and redistribution preferences
Korpi and Palme’s (1998) classic “The Paradox of Redistribution and Strategies of Equality” claims
that universal social policy better reduces poverty than social policies targeted at the poor. This
article revisits Korpi and Palme’s classic, and in the process, explores and informs a set of enduring
questions about social policy, politics, and social equality. Specifically, we investigate the
relationships between three dimensions of welfare transfers – “transfer share” (the average share of
household income from welfare transfers), low-income targeting, and universalism – and poverty
and preferences for redistribution. We analyze rich democracies like Korpi and Palme, but also
generalize to a broader sample of developed and developing countries. Consistent with Korpi and
Palme, we show: a) poverty is negatively associated with the transfer share and universalism; b)
redistribution preferences are negatively associated with low-income targeting; and c) universalism
is positively associated with the transfer share. Contrary to Korpi and Palme, redistribution
preferences are not related to transfer share or universalism; and low-income targeting is not
positively associated with poverty and not negatively associated with transfer share. Therefore,
instead of the “paradox of redistribution” we propose two new paradoxes of social policy: noncomplementarity
and undermining. The non-complementarity paradox is that there is a mismatch
between the dimensions that matter to poverty and the dimension that matters to redistribution
preferences. The undermining paradox emphasizes that the dimension (transfer share) that most
reduces poverty tends to increase with the one dimension (low-income targeting) that reduces
support for redistribution.