1. Verba, Sidney., Brady, Henry. and Schlozman, Kay."Why No Confiscation in America: The Median Voter and Economic Redistribution" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Hilton Chicago and the Palmer House Hilton, Chicago, IL, Sep 02, 2004 Online <.PDF>. 2009-11-27 <http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p60779_index.html>
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.
