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Composition of Government Budget, Non‐Single Peakedness, and Majority Voting
Author(s) -
Bearse Peter,
Glomm Gerhard,
Janeba Eckhard
Publication year - 2001
Publication title -
journal of public economic theory
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.809
H-Index - 32
eISSN - 1467-9779
pISSN - 1097-3923
DOI - 10.1111/1097-3923.00079
Subject(s) - voting , public finance , economics , government (linguistics) , voting trust , composition (language) , government budget , microeconomics , majority rule , revenue , simple (philosophy) , property (philosophy) , tax revenue , public economics , monetary economics , econometrics , disapproval voting , macroeconomics , finance , political science , linguistics , philosophy , epistemology , politics , law
In this paper we study whether majority voting equilibria exist when preferences over public policies are not single peaked. The government levies a proportional income tax. Tax revenue is used to finance a uniform lump‐sum transfer and public education. Individuals vote on the composition of the government budget. We show that the single‐crossing property cannot be invoked to establish existence of a majority voting equilibrium. In a simple parametric example we find that cycles are pervasive.