2008 / 53 Voting for redistribution under desert - sensitive altruism

We endow individuals that di¤er in skill levels and tastes for working with altruistic preferences for redistribution in a voting model where a unidimensional redistributive parameter is chosen by majority voting in a direct democracy. When altruistic preferences are desert-sensitive, i.e. when there is a reluctance to redistribute from the hard-working to the lazy, we show that lower levels of redistribution emerge in political equilibrium. We provide empirical evidence, based on the ISSP 1992 dataset, that preferences for redistribution are not purely selfish and that desert-sensitive motivations play a signi…cant role. We estimate that preferences for redistribution are signi…cantly more desert-sensitive in the US than in Europe. We believe that di¤erences in desert-sensitive preferences for redistribution help explain the di¤erent social contracts that prevail in both continents. Keywords: altruism, voting, redistribution, desert, responsibility, compensation. JEL Classi…cation: D31, D63, D64, D72. 1SHERPPA, Ghent University and CORE, Université Catholique de Louvain. Postdoctoral Fellow of the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO). 2Centre d’Economie de la Sorbonne, University Paris I Panthéon Sorbonne. 3This text presents research results of the Belgian Program on Interuniversity Poles of Attraction initiated by the Belgian State, Prime Minister’s O¢ ce, Science Policy Programming. The scienti…c responsibility is assumed by the authors.