IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/restud/v71y2004i1p115-132.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Voting on Majority Rules

Author

Listed:
  • Matthias Messner
  • Mattias K. Polborn

Abstract

We analyse an overlapping generations model of voting on "reform projects". These resemble investments in that they first require some investment expenditure and later payoff. Since the time during which old people get the benefit is shorter, or because older people are more wealthy and hence pay more taxes, they are more conservative (against reforms) than young people.We show that if people vote on which majority should be required in future elections for a bill to become a law, the winning proposal specifies a supermajority. This result is very robust even if age related conflict is only one determinant among others for voting behaviour in the society. Copyright 2004, Wiley-Blackwell.

Suggested Citation

  • Matthias Messner & Mattias K. Polborn, 2004. "Voting on Majority Rules," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 71(1), pages 115-132.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:restud:v:71:y:2004:i:1:p:115-132
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1111/0034-6527.00278
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:restud:v:71:y:2004:i:1:p:115-132. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/restud .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.