Redistribution Tax under Non-benevolent Governments

The author analyzes redistribution policies of majority governments in one kind of representative voting system. He employs these assumptions: members gain special benefits in the majority; parties act strategically by using redistribution transfers; the member's utility function is given in a quasi-linear function; the government's objective functions are the weighted summation of utilities and the author classifies governments according to the weight. The four main results are: a stable majority dose not support myopic government; the stable redistribution policy of benevolent government is expressed by a scope of transfers; the stable transfer of nonbenevolent governments depends on private utilities of the majority and opportunity costs of the minority; and the altruistic government is not displayed by any other majority, because it offers the total welfare of the majority to the minority as a subsidy. Copyright 1998 by Kluwer Academic Publishers