The present study aims to test Meltzer and Richard’s (1981) hypothesis that lower-income individuals vote for candidates who favor higher taxes and more redistribution. Assuming that left-wing parties advocate a general increase in taxation, we estimate a vote function for the French Cantonal...

Tests of the relationship between budget rules and fiscal performance are metric sensitive and arbitrary in the evaluation of the stringency of the rules, in the aggregation of these evaluations in an index and in the imposition of a linearly specified model. We propose a nonlinear principal...