Voting on Income Redistribution: How a Little Bit of Altruism Creates Transitivity

Donald Wittman

Santa Cruz Department of Economics, Working Paper Series from Department of Economics, UC Santa Cruz

Abstract: We consider an election that is solely concerned with redistribution of income. It is well known that when voters are selfish, there is no political equilibrium. We consider the case where voters are modestly altruistic. We demonstrate that modest altruism results in a unique political equilibrium. We also provide an explanation for why voters are much more altruistic than individuals acting alone.

Keywords: political income redistribution; altruism; transitivity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2005-02-01
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

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