How does the redistribution of income that a regime prescribes for society and the amount of public-good social-overhead investment it provides depend on the nature of that regime? And how do these influence said society’s productive success? Connections among these phenomena informed much of Mancur Olson’s (1982, 1991) life-work now so foundational to the literature on redistributive politics, economic growth/prosperity, and the nature of regimes. Still a transparent simple account of how the nature of a regime determines trade-offs between transfers and public capital investment can improve the foundations and clarify anomalies present in the literature. Here we elaborate a model to address these questions and we prove, contrary to received wisdom, that redistribution can reduce or actually and unexpectedly increase supplies of public overhead capital. Redistributive taxation reduces capital productivity, which incentivizes governments to supply less. But, contrary to conventional wisdom, redistribution can also so deplete the tax base that to offset some of the loss government will actually invest more in the way of public-overhead factor inputs than would a less redistributive regime of an otherwise comparable society.

Decision making in international organizations is a multistage and complex process. This paper is confi ned however only to one but the most important stage, either the voting on a one proposal, which may be accepted or rejected, or the choice between two alternative proposals. This seemingly simple, dichotomous decision can be made by many different methods of voting, i.e. simple majority; absolute majority; qualifi ed majority; voting with quorum; weighted voting; voting with a possibility of veto etc. These methods differ in their properties: equal vs. unequal treatment of the participants of decision-making assembly; the manner of respecting of minority rights; equal vs. unequal treatment of possible decisions; sensitiveness to changes of decisions of particular participants; effectiveness and other. These properties express postulates: anonymity; semi-duality; citizen sovereignty; monotonicity and strong monotonicity; unanimity, unrestricted domain etc. Some of these properties exclude the other. The choice of the particular method of voting means an acceptation of some postulates and a resignation from the other postulates.