Standard political economy models of redistribution, notably that of Meltzer and Richard (1981), fail to account for the remarkable variance in government redistribution across democracies. We develop a general model of redistribution that explains why some democratic governments are more prone...

Democratic institutions aggregate preferences poorly. The norm of one-person-one-vote with majority rule treats people fairly by giving everyone an equal chance to influence outcomes, but fails to give proportional weight to people whose interests in a social outcome are stronger than those of...

The paper challenges the "orthodox doctrine" of collective choice theory according to which Arrow's "general possibility theorem" precludes rational decision procedures generally and implies that in particular all voting procedures must be flawed. I point out that all voting procedures are...