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	Meltzer-Richard Model	Probabilistic Voting Model
Ämnesområde	Political Economy	Political Economy
Familj	MCDM	MCDM
Ursprungsår	1981	1987
Upphovsperson	Allan Meltzer & Scott Richard	Assar Lindbeck, Jörgen Weibull & Peter Coughlin
Typ	Formal model of redistribution and government size	Formal model of electoral competition
Ursprungskälla	Meltzer, A. H., & Richard, S. F. (1981). A Rational Theory of the Size of Government. Journal of Political Economy, 89(5), 914-927.	Lindbeck, A., & Weibull, J. W. (1987). Balanced-budget redistribution as the outcome of political competition. Public Choice, 52(3), 273-297.
Alias	Meltzer-Richard Hypothesis, Rational Theory of Government Size, Median Voter Theory of Redistribution, MR Model	Probabilistic Voting Theory, Lindbeck-Weibull Model, Coughlin Probabilistic Voting Model, Stochastic Voting Model
Närliggande	4	4
Sammanfattning	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 probabilistic voting model is a formal theory of electoral competition in which each voter's choice between two parties is treated as stochastic rather than deterministic, governed by a smooth probability that depends on the policy utilities the parties offer plus idiosyncratic and partisan preference shocks. Developed by Assar Lindbeck and Jörgen Weibull in 1987 and given its general treatment by Peter Coughlin in 1992, the model replaces the knife-edge switching of the median voter framework with continuous vote-share functions. Two office-seeking parties maximize expected vote share, and the resulting equilibrium maximizes a density-weighted social welfare function in which the most responsive — the swing — voters carry the greatest weight. Crucially, the model delivers a determinate, interior equilibrium even in multidimensional policy spaces where a Condorcet winner generically fails to exist.