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	Meltzer-Richard Model	Veto Player Analysis
Field	Political Economy	Political Science
Family	MCDM	MCDM
Year of origin	1981	1995
Originator	Allan Meltzer & Scott Richard	George Tsebelis
Type	Formal model of redistribution and government size	Comparative institutional analysis framework
Seminal source	Meltzer, A. H., & Richard, S. F. (1981). A Rational Theory of the Size of Government. Journal of Political Economy, 89(5), 914-927.	Tsebelis, G. (2002). Veto Players: How Political Institutions Work. Princeton University Press. ISBN: 9780691091891
Aliases	Meltzer-Richard Hypothesis, Rational Theory of Government Size, Median Voter Theory of Redistribution, MR Model	Veto Players Theory, Veto Points Analysis, Tsebelis Veto Player Framework, Policy Stability Analysis
Related	4	4
Summary	The Meltzer-Richard model is the canonical political-economy theory of the size of government, developed by Allan Meltzer and Scott Richard in 1981. It embeds the median voter theorem in a fiscal setting: the decisive median voter chooses a single linear (proportional) income tax rate whose revenue funds a uniform lump-sum transfer to everyone. Because income distributions are right-skewed, the median income falls below the mean, so the median voter is a net beneficiary of redistribution and votes for a positive tax. The model's central prediction is that the size of government rises with the ratio of mean to median income — and therefore with inequality — and with any extension of the franchise that lowers the decisive voter's relative income.	Veto player analysis is a spatial-institutional framework, developed by George Tsebelis in his 1995 article and 2002 book, for predicting the capacity of a political system to change policy. A veto player is any individual or collective actor whose agreement is required to alter the status quo. The theory shows that the potential for policy change shrinks as the number of veto players grows, as the ideological distance between them widens, and as their internal cohesion increases — three structural variables that together determine a system's policy stability independently of constitutional labels such as presidentialism or parliamentarism.