Evaluating the median voter model’s explanatory power

Evaluating the Median Voter Model’s Explanatory Power

We match individual senators’ voting behavior on legislative proposals with 24 real referenda decisions on exactly the same issues with identical wording. This setting allows us to evaluate the median voter model’s quality with revealed constituents’ preferences. Results indicate a limited explanatory power of the median voter model: It explains 17.6 percentage points more than random voting an...

The Politics of Consumption Taxes: Globalization and the Median Voter

The regressive nature of consumption taxes poses a challenge to partisan theory. Using data for up to 20 OECD countries in the period 1970-2003 this article aims to explore the question of whether the idea that social democratic governments typically have to compromise on policy goals and core constituency interests to make themselves more appealing to the median voter necessitates the use of r...

Bargaining foundations of the median voter theorem

We provide strong game-theoretic foundations for the median voter theorem in a onedimensional bargaining model based on Baron and Ferejohn’s (1989) model of distributive politics. We prove that, as the agents become arbitrarily patient, the set of proposals that can be passed in any subgame perfect equilibrium collapses to the median voter’s ideal point. While we leave the possibility of some d...

the politics of consumption taxes: globalization and the median voter

the regressive nature of consumption taxes poses a challenge to partisan theory. using data for up to 20 oecd countries in the period 1970-2003 this article aims to explore the question of whether the idea that social democratic governments typically have to compromise on policy goals and core constituency interests to make themselves more appealing to the median voter necessitates the use of r...

Evaluating a Voter Outreach Initiative