Meltzer-Richard Model

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.