More generally, it has been argued that improvement of institutional quality
should result in more equitable income distribution for a number of reasons
(Huther and Shah 2000). The egalitarian distribution of political rights (e.g., voice
and accountability), in addition to political stability and regulatory enforcement,
is indispensable for public policy and reform that are in favor of the majority
of society. Further, a frail judicial system tends to allow the elites to extract economic
rents away from the poor (Kayizzi-Mugerwa 2001).However, the empirical
evidence on this relationship seems to be mixed (Zhuang et al. 2010). Bollen and