Copyright © 2010 Paula Curt et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

Analyzing voting on income taxation usually implies mathematically cumbersome models. Moreover, a majority voting winner does not usually exist in such setups. Therefore, it is important to mathematically describe those cases in which a majority winner exists, at least for the basic models of voting on income taxation. We provide a complete mathematical description of those income distribution functions for which a majority winning tax exists (or does not exist), in the quadratic taxation model à la Roemer (1999), with tax schedules that are not necessarily purely redistributive. As an intermediate step, we identify by the corner method what are the most preferred taxes of the individuals, when taxation is not purely redistributive. Finally, we prove that for both purely and nonpurely redistributive quadratic taxations, the sufficient inequality condition of De Donder and Hindriks (2004) on the income distribution functions, for the existence of a Condorcet winner, can be relaxed to a broader condition.