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Median voter, redistribution, social mobility
Abstract:
We investigate redistributive taxation in a political economy experiment and
determine how different patterns of social mobility affect the choices of
redistributional taxes. In the absence of social mobility, voters choose tax rates
that are very well in line with the prediction derived in the standard framework
by Meltzer and Richard (1981). However, past or future changes in the income
hierarchy affect the choice of the tax rate in the current period. The same is true
for social mobility within the period to which the tax rate choice applies and for
the case where the choice of the tax rate takes place behind the veil of
ignorance. Due to our design of the experiment, these strong effects of own
social mobility cannot be attributed to social or other-regarding preferences.
