[amreact]

Somewhere I read that the idea proposed that the more money flows from the government to voters, the more mud slinging happens.

For example, after the Civil War in the U.S., politics got extremely bad due to the large numbers of voters who were veterans and were receiving money from the government. Things got less nasty after those people died.

The idea is that nowadays in the U.S., there are several ways large numbers of voters get money from the government: welfare, government employment, and government contractor employment. Speaking generally, the Democrats tend to have more voters on welfare and directly employed by the government, while the Republicans tend to have more voters in government contractor jobs. So, each party has policies that give more money to their constituents, which results in bitter political fighting.

I know I'm being hand-wavy but that's the general idea. Here are some links that support this idea:

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/07/12/the-politics...

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/15/upshot/how-we-became-bitt...

[pjc50]

This would imply there's some correlation between countries with large state sectors and political vitriol and dissonance, which absolutely does not appear to be the case.

(Also, politics after the civil war was brutal because Reconstruction was necessarily the destruction and re-building of a culture at gunpoint, that of the slave owners. Their resentment is still a poisonous factor in current US politics, Charlottesville passim)

[sjg007]

You forgot corporate welfare.