Voter participation and the redistributive state

The redistributive theory of the state implies that voter participation rates should be highest among those who have the most to gain or lose or a V-shaped relationship between income and voting participation should exist. We use a data set that contains nearly 21,000 observations on individual survey responses about voting behavior in the U.S. between 1972 and 1993 to show that the participation rate generally rises monotonically with income, perhaps except at very high income levels. It does report other findings consistent with an economic theory of voting based on returns to association and with the hypothesis that public employees vote more.