Abstract

We show that a transfer received by a minority of the population may be sustained by majority voting, however small the minority targeted, when the attribution of the transfer is seen as stochastic by voters. We build a simple model where voters differ in income and vote over a proportional tax whose proceeds are distributed lump sum, and where each voter has a probability depending on his income to receive the transfer. In successive steps, we present intuitively appealing sufficient conditions on this probability function for the social program to be supported by majority voting. We also develop intuitive conditions for the emergence of the paradox of redistribution, where more targeting reduces the majority chosen size of the transfer program. We finally apply our framework to the French social housing program and obtain that our model is consistent with a majority of French voters supporting a positive size of this program. We also study sequential majority voting on the size of the public education sector and the funding of basic and advanced education. We assume that only the best students access to tertiary education and that children from rich families have higher probability to succeed,, on average. Under these assumptions, we show that income inequality can enlarge the political support for advanced education, reducing the budget for basic (universal) education.