Undemocratic Protection for Democracy in Welfare States

What could go wrong if we allow democracy to be democratic about its participatory qualifications? In this paper, I explore the sustainability of fair elections when parties can propose election laws affecting ethnic minorities’ voting rights with a game-theoretical model. In an infinitely repeated probabilistic voting game with complete information, I track the choice of voters in the single special election that defines voting rights discrimination for all future elections. In this model, whether the voters vote for or against fairer elections endogenously arises from the primitives of each game. The two main questions in the paper are: 1) Can we can expect fair elections to sustain themselves and 2) Can the socio-economic advances of minority status, such as residential integration or a rise in the number of rich minorities, guarantee fairer elections? This model finds that the answer to both questions is ‘no.’ Rather, the equilibrium outcome mostly depends on the size of the redistribution from the rich to the poor. In addition, the model shows that even social progress, such as residential integration, cannot guarantee the fairer-elections outcome if the government cannot reduce the size of redistribution to a very small amount by exempting the rich from taxation, regardless of the present electoral discrimination level. Economic progress of an ethnic minority may negate such conditions only when the rich ethnic minority is substantially richer than the rich ethnic majority, given the present level of discrimination.