Ideology, swing voters, and taxation

Abstract

Ideas about ethnicity, religion, and nationalism among others, which we label “ideology”, seem to affect the preferences of voters, political parties and finally, the equilibrium policy. In this paper we provide a political-economic model that traces the influence of ideology on determining the tax rate in political competition. What we found is that, when the salience of ideology increases, the cohort of voters with the median ideological view become the swing voters. Then, the equilibrium tax rate benefits that cohort of voters.