ABSTRACT
Contemporary debates about the political power of business can be seen as a struggle to reconcile the contradictory relationship between two observations. First, aggregate-level political outcomes appear to be biased in favour of the interests of the owners and managers of capitalist enterprises. Looking at individual wealth and income, for example, this bias is visible in the ‘paradox of redistribution’. As a universal characteristic of democratic capitalist societies, rights in the political realm are distributed equally, while the actual distributions of income and wealth are always such that the median falls short of the mean (Przeworski 2003: 198-9). According to the median voter theorem, for any distribution of single-peaked preferences in a uni-dimensional political space there exists a unique majority rule equilibrium, which is the choice of the voter with the median preference (Black 1948). With respect to income distribution, the voter with the median preference is the one with median income. It would thus be in her interest to support political parties that promise, and carry out, a redistributive shift of the median income toward the mean. The puzzle then is why the poor, unmatched in numbers and equipped with the right to vote, do not take away from the rich. After all, it was the expectation that the masses would use their ballots as ‘paper stones’, which gave Engels such confidence that the peaceful transformation of social institutions towards more egalitarian arrangements was imminent (Przeworski and Sprague 1986: 1). Assuming that above-median incomes are associated with ownership and/or management positions in capitalist enterprises, students of business political power are left to search for answers to the paradox.
