期刊名称：Journal of the Australasian Tax Teachers Association
印刷版ISSN：1832-911X
电子版ISSN：1832-911X
出版年度：2014
卷号：9
期号：1
出版社：Australasian Tax Teachers Association
摘要：Standard treatments of the politics of taxation and the determinants of the size of government draw on the median voter theorem, which assumes that the voting population is effectively a single electorate (see, for example, Meltzer and Richard, 1981). However, in a multi-electorate political system such as Australia’s, the policy preferred by the median voter of the entire population will not be stable — the bliss point of the overall median voter will not emerge as a Condorcet winner in a series of pairwise multi-electorate contests. Instead, the Condorcet winner is found by identifying the median voter in each separate electorate, arranging these medians in increasing order, then identifying the median of these medians. The policy distance between this ‘median of medians’ and the overall median can be very large. In other words, it is possible for ‘extreme’ policies to emerge as political equilibria. The article discusses the implications of these results for political competition, taxation policy and the size of government.
