A Positive Theory Of Income Taxation Where Politicians Focus Upon Swing And Core Voters

The authors construct an equilibrium model of party competition, in which parties are especially concerned with their core and swing voters, concerns which American political scientists have focused upon in their attempts to understand party behavior in general elections. Parties compete on a large policy space of possible income-tax policies. An element in this infinite-dimensional space is a function which maps pre-fisc income into post-fisc income. The only restrictions are that the function be continuous, and satisfy exogenously specified upper and lower bounds on its derivative, where it is differentiable.