Elections and income redistribution

This paper has analyzed a model of elections in which each candidate selects a reputation for the distribution of income that can be expected if he is elected. The first result established that, whenever there are three or more groups of voters and no single group has half or more of the voters, if the candidates believe that the voters' choices are determined solely by the candidates' redistributional reputations, then there is no electoral equilibrium. The candidates' expectations about the voters' choices were then reformulated, using a qualitative response model. The next result established that this alternative model leads to the existence of electoral equilibria. The remainder of the paper analyzed the nature of these equilibria (for any given electorate). Among other things, the results established that there is always a unique equilibrium, provided a simple procedure for finding the precise location of this equilibrium, and showed that this location implicitly maximizes the sum of the voters' utility functions on the possible income distributions. The penultimate sections provided some simple examples which illustrate the main results in the paper and a discussion of these results in terms of the politics of redistribution. Copyright Martinus Nijhoff Publishers 1986