Variation in individual shares in societal wealthx whatever their originx defines the most conspicuous cleavage in modern societies (Lipset and Rokkan 1967). Economic inequality is an important source of societal unrest. One of the major tasks of the state in modern welfare societies is to organize the redistribution of income among the whole population. Concomitantly, the perception of justice and the procedure of redistribution are among the most contested issues in democratic politics.
Assuming a fully redistributive tax, Meltzer and Richard (1981) have developed a model in which they show that the median voter decides on the size of the tax rate and hence on the level of redistribution. With increasing income, the preferred tax rate decreases. As the median voterts income shifts downward with increasing inequality, the tax rate in a society will increase with inequality. Direct empirical tests of the association between inequality and redistribution in democracies using aggregate data have yielded ambivalent results that tend toward insignificance (for an overview, see Perotti 1996:168-173).
Using more precise operationalizations, however, Milanovic (2000) reports a clear confirmation of the proposition that more unequal factor incomes produce more redistribution toward the poor. Subsequent theoretical and empirical work has shifted the emphasis to various institutional explanations, referring to benefit targeting (Moene and Wallerstein 2001), electoral representation (proportional vs. majoritarian) and their impact on the composition of coalition governments (Iversen and Soskice 2006; Persson et al. 2007). Typically, the expected institutional effects are confirmed in these studies.
These macrocomparative studies, however, suffer from the high level of aggregation of the data and the lack of isolation of the model from confounding factors, that may explain the lack of conclusive results across studies. In particular, these studies provide little understanding of the reasoning and of the mechanisms at work in the decisions leading to redistribution. Is redistribution the result of the aggregation of votes that have been guided by their material interest, or are principles of justice part of the reasoning? Depending on the answer to this question, different strategies for reducing injustice and inequality in society may be more appropriate. We therefore propose to link this literature with the experimental literatures on redistribution and on voting and electoral institutions.
The paper is organized as follows. The next section gives an overview of the literatures on justice and on voting and discusses the rationale of the theoretical model. In the third section we present the experiment, outline the design, the model, and the theoretical predictions. The fourth section discusses the results and the fifth section concludes.
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Equity and Equality in Voting on Redistribution: A Real effort Experiment
