Balanced-budget redistribution as the outcome of political competition: A comment

This comment is concerned with the relation between the basic model of elections and income redistribution in Lindbeck and Weibull (1987) and the model in Coughlin (1986a). Its purpose is to (i) isolate the (small set of) assumptions that separate these closely related models, (ii) identify a special case of the Lindbeck-Weibull model where their results immediately provide direct extensions of four of the results in my paper, and (iii) point out that one of the lemmata in my paper identifies the precise location of the equilibrium income distribution for this important special case of the Lindbeck-Weibull model. The comment also relates these observations to Lindbeck and Weibull's example of familiar assumptions that satisfy their sufficient conditions for the existence of a political equilibrium.I gratefully acknowledge (i) some helpful comments that Peter Ordeshook made as a discussant for Coughlin (1986a) (when I presented it at the 1986 Public Choice Society Meeting), which got me to start thinking about the issues that are addressed in this comment and (ii) some helpful suggestions provided by Peter Aranson.