In a message dated 12/5/02 12:56:07 AM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
Howdy,
I've never really studied the Median Voter Theorem.
Recently I read where someone claimed that the U.S.
political system was designed to keep the two parties
nearly identical by keeping other parties out. I
assumed that the reason they Dems Reps seem so close
may be because of the MVT--they want the middle guy's
vote. So then I thought, suppose a third party were
let into the race, does the MVT still hold w/ for 3 or
more candidates? Does it weaken as more candidates
are added, or do they all bunch toward the center for
for any n2, where n is the number of candidates?
Does anybody know of a good discussion of it online?
-jsh
Well look at the 1992 presidential race. You had Bob Dole, the tax-collector
for the welfare state who never met a tax hike he didn't like and the
architect of affirmative action, Bill second-biggest tax hike in history, and
Ross let's fix what's broke by raising taxes Perot. You essentially had
three mushy-moderate statist candidates running for office, and nobody openly
advocating either mainstream conservatism or mainstream liberalism (if there
is still such a thing). We needed Perot's brand of mushy-moderate statism
like Al-Queda needs a new form of explosive.
John Anderson in 1980 likewise offered fiscal conservatism and social
moderation, in other words, warmed over Jimmy Carter, although since Reagan
won, and would have won even had Carter gotten all of Anderson's votes
(unlikely in the extreme based on exit-polling) it would seem we had two
candidates rather far from the media voter.
Still, most third party candidates in America (and perhaps in some of the
parliamentary democracies) seem to offer platforms that are determinedly away
from the median voter's squishy preferences. I think of candidates like
Strom Thurmond, who probably captured the median white voter in the South,
but fared poorly with most other voters. Green Party and Libertarian Party
candidates, offering platforms well away from the median voter, fare even
more poorly, at least in all but small local races. (I recall a bar owner in
Denver, registered as a Libertarian, getting elected to the Denver Election
Commission while I lived out there.)
From the little I know about the MVT--and it's little indeed--it seems to
assume that the candidates have no ability to influence the median voter, so
as to move it more or less in one direction or the other. If so I'd have to
say that it makes a more-than-heroic assumption. I think few people would
have guessed that during what appeared to be the heyday of unabashed
statist-liberalism and in the wake of Watergate that a strongly-conservative
Republican candidate would win by a large majority in 1980. It's remarkable
how quickly attitudes appeared to shift on a wide variety of issues from
busing to taxes, to welfare programs to abortion to defense.
While it's undoubtedly true that many people secretly agreed with Ronald
Reagan's positions throughout the 1970s but feared to admit it to avoid
social condemnation, it must also be true that Reagan and his supporters
persuaded others who had not previously agreed, thus shifting the median
voters toward the right across a spectrum of issues. By focusing on the
median voter, the MVT seems to give credence to the mushy moderate's election
creed--pander to me or lose when I vote for your opponent--but oftentimes,
as we've seen in recent elections with Libertarians pulling votes from
Republicans and Greens pulling votes from Democrats that not pandering to the
extremes loses elections too.
Indeed, it's not clear that the median voter theorem actually describes the
process by which candidates typically win in highly-publicized elections.
Presidents don't typically win by persuading all the mushy moderates, who
tend to break both ways and can't generally be relied upon by a major party
no matter what it does, but rather by building coalitions of voters
highly-motivated by various issues. Put together a coalition of blacks,
Jews, Northern WASP elites and labor union members and you can win even if
you're too liberal (or too statist) for the median voter. Put together a
coalition of defense hawks, right-to-bear-arms advocates, tax-cutters,
budget-balancers, welfare-cutters, deregulators and pro-life advocates and
again you can win without appealing too much to that mushy moderate in the
middle.
Voters tend to vote based on how they feel about candidates rather than what
they think about candidates. The highly-ideological voter bases that feeling
on the candidates' position on issues. But the mushy moderate median voter
(that has a nice assonance to it, doesn't it?) based that feeling on things
like how well-spoken the candidates seem, or whether the candidate came to
the voter's house for the Iowa Caucus or has a funny accent made from a Texas
accent overlaid on a Georgian
