If anything, divisiveness and polarization would describe recent politics (2016-2020). This has made me question my understanding of what's known in public choice as the median voter theorem (MVT). In a post a few years back I wrote the following about the MVT:
"....the median point of the preference distribution will elicit the most votes. Only those laws or candidates with a centrist twist will get the majority of the votes. Only those voters with centrist views will be happy, and it makes it very difficult for candidates to be elected if they want to bring about major reforms. This phenomenon is referred to as the ‘median voter theorem."
Similarly, in his primer article on public choice theory, Pierre Lemieux describes the MVT:
"a simple majority vote will be the ideal (or most favored) alternative that is at the median point of the preference distribution....This explains why, especially in two-party systems, political platforms are so similar"
This was probably my first reading about the MVT, and given the politics of the early 2000s it made sense and led me to believe American politics would most always produce 'moderate' candidates. Others seem to have made similar interpretations about the MVT producing moderates as winners of elections. Economist David Henderson writes in 2017:
"If the Democrats go far to the left of the median voter, what’s the Republicans’ best response if their goal is to win? It’s to go further left themselves"
Economist Tyler Cowen writes in the NYT a few years earlier in 2010:
"Any politician who strays too far from voters at the philosophical center will soon be out of office....In fact, there is a dynamic that pushes politicians to embrace the preferences of the typical or “median” voter, who sits squarely in the middle of public opinion. A significant move to either the left or the right would open the door for a rival to take a more moderate stance, win the next election and change the agenda."
In 2011 when I wrote my post, this all made sense. But recent events leave me with a number of questions about the MVT. Can the MVT explain political candidates as different as Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders? Or even Joe Biden for that matter? How different are voter preferences from the preferences of citizens in general? Are preference distributions bimodal? Maybe within each party the MVT holds but it breaks down at a national level if distributions are bimodal?
In his piece, Tyler Cowen definitely helps remind us that the MVT has its limitations, and maybe recent politics are testing those limitations:
"Of course, the median voter theorem is far from a complete explanation of politics. Sometimes politicians lead public opinion and talk voters into accepting new ideas, as when President Bill Clinton promoted Nafta. And voters often favor conflicting or contradictory policies, like wanting to pull troops out of Iraq but also not wanting Iraq to explode into chaos."
I have not taken any deep dives in the recent literature, but I found a very insightful post on the London School of Economics blog post written by Richard Bronk. It seems to get to some of the questions I have had recently.
Why have moderate candidates been losing support (and elections)?
"When the financialised version of global capitalism enabled by this consensus ended in the financial crash of 2008 and long years of rising inequality and insecurity, voters were primed to look for radical alternatives to the status quo. Parties pursuing a median-voter strategy – along with the main institutions of the state and most market participants – were locked into what Wade Jacoby and I have called an ‘analytical monoculture’ that left them blind to problems that are not articulated in the language of standard economics and risk management."
How or why might the median voter strategy have failed?
"Only when all elements of the political centre had failed to address their concerns did electors risk voting for ‘anti-system’ alternatives"...[the MVT] assumed that political preferences could be placed on a single continuum (and that disparate underlying values could be converted to a single scale), so that governments could satisfy the preferences of a simple majority of the people and calculate the optimum set of policy trade-offs....[the MVT] underestimated how contested and unstable are the trade-offs between different goals – such as freedom and security, efficiency and equality, medical health and economic growth. There is no one right and rational set of trade-offs for an individual or society"
Is all lost in American (and global) politics? Not necessarily. We could see a return to moderation:
"it may follow that, as anti-system (and often populist) governments are in turn seen to flounder in their management of crises, anti-incumbency may work against the new players themselves.....Voters have noticed that what works to win electoral campaigns does not necessarily solve practical policy problems..."
If any economist might have ideas about how to handle social dilemmas, it would be Elinor Ostrom:
"crisis fatigue may cause voters to shun grand solutions with unknowable consequences and prefer the sort of incremental reform traditionally associated with moderate political parties of left and right. Uncertainty may also increase the voter appeal of the decentralised and ‘polycentric’ approach that Elinor Ostrom argued has the best chance of tackling urgent shared problems – by encouraging diverse experiments in living that engage and involve ordinary voters."
Additional References:
Lemieux, Pierre, The Public Choice Revolution. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=604046
