Majority Support for Progressive Income Taxation with Corner Preferences

This paper studies voting over quadratic taxation when income is fixed and taxation non distortionary. The set of feasible taxes is compact and self-interested voters have corner preferences. We first show that, if a majority winning tax policy exists, it involves maximum progressivity. We then give a necessary and sufficient condition on the income distribution for a majority winner to exist. This condition appears to be satisfied for a large class of distribution functions.