Democracy and Equality Preferences

John A. Bishop and Haiyong Liu

A chapter in Inequality, Taxation and Intergenerational Transmission, 2018, vol. 26, pp 283-297 from Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Abstract: This chapter argues that in countries with well-functioning democracies most individuals should be “content” with the underlying income distribution. The authors derive this result from James Buchanan’s notion of a “fiscal constitution.” The authors test this hypothesis using data from the World Values Survey where respondents are asked whether “incomes should be more equal …, or do we need larger differences in income as incentives?” The authors’ empirical results indicate that the concentration of re-distributional preferences around the median response is positively related to the presence of a democratic voice.

Keywords: Income distribution; equality preferences; democracy; fiscal constitution redistribution; economic freedom; D31; D63; D72; H11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eme:reinzz:s1049-258520180000026012

DOI: 10.1108/S1049-258520180000026012

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