You Get What You Asked For: A Laboratory Experiment on Framing Effects in Voting on Income Redistribution

Does it matter if we ask people to decide on the question ``What share shall everyone contribute to redistribution?'' or ``What should the minimal income be?''. In the Meltzer-Richard (1981) model the level of redistribution is based on a single parameter - the tax rate. Fixing the tax rate under a given set of gross incomes also fixes the minimal net income of the poorest member. That means that a decision on a minimal basic income can be translated into a linear tax rate. Political actors may seek to reap electoral benefit from framing the decision on redistribution in terms of minimal income rather than tax. To explore the impact of such purely rhetoric tactics on the individual and collective choice, we design a laboratory experiment in which we focus on a comparison of decisions about a linear tax rate and a minimal income using the same calculus of redistribution.