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	Meltzer-Richard Model	Median Voter Model
Campo	Political Economy	Political Economy
Famiglia	MCDM	MCDM
Anno di origine	1981	1948
Ideatore	Allan Meltzer & Scott Richard	Duncan Black & Anthony Downs
Tipo	Formal model of redistribution and government size	Formal model of electoral competition
Fonte seminale	Meltzer, A. H., & Richard, S. F. (1981). A Rational Theory of the Size of Government. Journal of Political Economy, 89(5), 914-927.	Black, D. (1948). On the Rationale of Group Decision-making. Journal of Political Economy, 56(1), 23-34.
Alias	Meltzer-Richard Hypothesis, Rational Theory of Government Size, Median Voter Theory of Redistribution, MR Model	Median Voter Theorem, Black's Median Voter Theorem, Downsian Median Voter Model, Median Voter Equilibrium
Correlati	4	4
Sintesi	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.	The median voter model is a foundational result of political economy stating that, under majority rule with voters whose preferences are single-peaked on a single policy dimension, the ideal point of the median voter is the Condorcet winner — it cannot be beaten by any other alternative in pairwise majority voting. Duncan Black established the theorem formally in 1948, and Anthony Downs extended it in 1957 into a theory of party competition in which two vote-maximizing parties converge to the median voter's preferred policy. The model is the workhorse linking the distribution of citizen preferences to equilibrium policy outcomes in democracies.