ABSTRACT
Why No Confiscation in America?
Political Participation, Political Parties, and the Median Voter Theorem
Why don’t the lower and middle classes vote to confiscate the wealth of the
affluent in political systems where the franchise is universal and each citizen has one
vote? Anthony Downs argued that confiscation would occur because “the equality of
franchise in a democratic society creates a tendency for government action to equalize
incomes by redistributing them from a few wealthy persons to many less wealthy ones.”
In an effort to appeal to the electoral majority who are at the lower end of the income
distribution, we should find governments engaging in substantial redistribution from rich
to poor through government spending. Yet we do not see this happening in America.
To understand the impact of citizen politics on income redistribution one needs to
take into account several additional features of the American political system which leads
to modifications in the median voter model:
•
The citizen with the median income is not the median participant -- Citizens may
have equal voting rights, but they are not equal participants. The median
participant is not the median voter and the median voter is not the person with the
median income in the society. Some people do not vote at all, and some engage
in activities such as giving money that have much more clout than the one vote
allocated to each individual.
•
Objective economic position and economic preferences may differ -- The relevant
median point may be on a scale of preferences (in particular, preferences for
economic policy) that differs dramatically from objective economic position (in
particular, family income). The basic dimension of politics is not the objective
fact of family income; it is subjective preferences about economic issues.
•
Political parties may not offer median policies based upon the objective
circumstances of the median income -- Political parties care about more than
maximizing their chances of winning in a general election. Consequently, they do
not choose to position themselves at the median voter, and the relevant median, in
some circumstance, is the median position within the support base of one or the
other party.
Our analysis does not so much question the logic of the median voter model, as it adds
additional considerations about the context in which it is applied. These considerations
help us understand why there is so little redistribution through the electoral process in the
United States and also why redistribution downwards has not increased as income
inequality has risen.
Convention