Don’t shoot yourself in the foot! A (real-effort task) experiment on income redistribution and voting Jiménez Jiménez, Natalia Molís Bañales, Elena Solano García, Ángel Income inequality Income redistribution Voting Taxation Real-effort task This paper reports results from a laboratory experiment that investigates the Meltzer–Richard model of equilibrium tax rates in which individuals are either low or high skilled workers and face a real-effort task that includes leisure at the work place. We find that a large proportion of lowskilled workers vote for the lowest tax rate (the one that gives them the lowest payoff), especially when the alternative tax rate is very high. However, this proportion is significantly reduced in treatments in which the subjects are given extra information about how the tax operates in redistributing income. This result suggests that the lack of information about the role of taxes in income redistribution may be an important factor in explaining the counter-intuitive voting behavior of low-income voters over income redistribution. We also find some support that the prospect of upward mobility and the belief in the negative effect of taxes on productivity make low-income voters support low tax rates, especially when the alternative tax rate is very high 2023-07-21T08:54:24Z 2023-07-21T08:54:24Z 2022-11-13 journal article N. Jiménez-Jiménez et al. Don’t shoot yourself in the foot! A (real-effort task) experiment on income redistribution and voting. European Journal of Political Economy 78 (2023) 102325 https://hdl.handle.net/10481/83904 10.1016/j.ejpoleco.2022.102325 eng http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ open access Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 Internacional Elsevier