Expressive Voting and Government Redistribution*

Expressive voting and government redistribution : Testing

Models of expressive voting postulate that voters will ‘consume’ ideological stances on issues by voting for them, even when they are against the voter’s own narrow self interest, if the probability of being a decisive voter is low. When a voter is unlikely to sway the outcome, the odds that a voter will incur any real personal cost (a higher tax burden, for example) from her own expressive vot...

Voters, Dictators, and Peons: Expressive Voting and Pivotality

Why do the poor vote against redistribution? We experimentally examine one explanation, namely that individuals gain direct expressive utility from voting in accordance with their ideology and understand they are unlikely to be pivotal; hence, their expressive utility, even if arbitrarily small, determines their voting behavior. In contrast with a basic prediction of this explanation, we …nd th...

Income Inequality, Voting over the Size of Public Consumption, and Growth

According to a standard argument, higher income inequality fosters redistributive activities of the government in favor of the median income earner. This paper shows that if redistribution is achieved by a public provision of goods and services rather than by transfers, higher income inequality may imply a smaller size of the government in majority voting equilibrium. In addition to a static vo...

A Study of Factors that Influenced Voters’ Behaviour: A Case of Billiri Local Government (2019 General Elections)

The Dynamics of Government: a positive analysis∗

How does the size of the transfer system evolve in the short and in the long run? We model income redistribution as determined by voting among individuals of different types and income realizations. Taxation is distortionary because it discourages effort to accumulate human capital. Voters are fully rational, realizing that transfers have implications also for future economic decisions and taxa...