Essays on Voting, Policy and Campaigning

This book deals with ‘the voting, policy and campaigning , comprising two related parts. The first part attempts to examine the theoretical relationship between probabilistic voting and policy, and the second focuses on the empirical relationship between voting and campaigning. Tax policy in democratic societies can best be understood as the equilibrium outcome of a political process that trades off economic and political forces within a given set of institutions. The essential facts of observed tax systems can be seen as the outcome of optimising economic and political behaviours. Among available models, the probabilistic voting model appears well suited to deal with tax structure in a democratic setting. The probabilistic voting is a theory of electoral competition in which political parties or politicians offer policy platforms to the voters, and vote-maximising candidates are uncertain about the mapping from policy to aggregate voting behaviour. Application of the probabilistic voting model to tax policy has been a topic of interest in taxation theory.