The median-voter hypothesis has been central to an extensive literature on the relationship between income inequality and public income redistribution. Knowing that the real-world market income distributions are skewed to the right, a majority of individuals earns an income that is strictly lower than the mean; the economic theory of democracy predicts a radical redistribution in favour of the poor and middle class. But a large empirical literature looking at explicit redistributive social transfers shows that it is rather the exception than the norm.