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It is Hobbes, not Rousseau: an experiment on voting and redistribution

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2025

Antonio Cabrales ,
Rosemarie Nagel  and
José V. Rodríguez Mora
Antonio Cabrales*
Affiliation:
Departamento de Economía, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Madrid 126, 28903 Getafe, Spain CEPR, London, UK
Rosemarie Nagel*
Affiliation:
ICREA & Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain
José V. Rodríguez Mora*
Affiliation:
Departamento de Economía, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Madrid 126, 28903 Getafe, Spain CEPR, London, UK University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK
*
[email protected] url: http://www.eco.uc3m.es/acabrales
[email protected]
[email protected]
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Abstract

We perform an experiment which provides a laboratory replica of some important features of the welfare state. In the experiment, all individuals in a group decide whether to make a costly effort, which produces a random (independent) outcome for each one of them. The group members then vote on whether to redistribute the resulting and commonly known total sum of earnings equally amongst themselves. This game has two equilibria, if played once. In one of them, all players make effort and there is little redistribution. In the other one, there is no effort and nothing to redistribute. A solution to the repeated game allows for redistribution and high effort, sustained by the threat to revert to the worst of these equilibria. Our results show that redistribution with high effort is not sustainable. The main reason for the absence of redistribution is that rich agents do not act differently depending on whether the poor have worked hard or not. The equilibrium in which redistribution may be sustained by the threat of punishing the poor if they do not exert effort is not observed in the experiment. Thus, the explanation of the behavior of the subjects lies in Hobbes, not in Rousseau.

Keywords

RedistributionPolitical equilibriumVotingMultiple equilibriaExperiments

JEL classification

O38: Government Policy E24: Employment • Unemployment • Wages • Intergenerational Income Distribution • Aggregate Human Capital • Aggregate Labor Productivity I31: General Welfare, Well-Being H24: Personal Income and Other Nonbusiness Taxes and Subsidies C92: Laboratory, Group Behavior D72: Political Processes: Rent-Seeking, Lobbying, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior C72: Noncooperative Games
Type
Original Paper
Information
Experimental Economics , Volume 15 , Issue 2 , June 2012 , pp. 278 - 308
Copyright
Copyright © 2011 Economic Science Association

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Footnotes

We thank Iris Bohnet, Tim Cason, David Cooper, John Duffy, Maia Guell, John Van Huyck and Robin Mason for helpful conversations and encouragement. The comments of the Editor and two referees helped improve the paper. We gratefully acknowledge the financial support from Spain's Ministry of Science and Innovation under grants CONSOLIDER INGENIO 2010 CSD2006-0016 (all authors), ECO2009-10531 (Cabrales), ECO2008-01768 (Nagel) and the Comunidad de Madrid under grant Excelecon (Cabrales), the Generalitat de Catalunya and the CREA program (Nagel), and project SEJ2007-64340 of Spain's Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia (Rodríguez Mora).

Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:https://doi.org/10.1007/s10683-011-9300-x) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

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