The median voter hypothesis has been central to an extensive literature on consequences of income distribution. For example, it has been proposed that greater inequality is associated with lower growth, because of the greater redistribution that is sought by the median voter when income distribution is less equal. There have however been no proper tests of the median-voter hypothesis concerning...

The median-voter hypothesis (MVH) predicts convergence of two party platforms across a one-dimensional political spectrum during majoritarian elections. From the viewpoint MVH, an explanation polarization is that each election has different median voter so cannot please all voters at same time. We consider parties competing to win along and assume nominates one candidate out in primary election...

Candidates run for (a one-shot) election, adopting a platform of a single-dimensional policy variable p ∈[0,1]. Voters with heterogeneous single-peaked preferences over policies know candidates’ announced platforms, but perceive that the actual policy which would be implemented should that candidate be elected is a random variable (with mean equal to the announced platform) whose distribution i...

Empirical studies of the connection between citizen preferences and legislator actions have largely focused on the preferences of a district’s average or median voter. While many theories suggest that preference heterogeneity should also affect this connection, few empirical analyses have rigorously tested claims about the distribution of individual voter preferences. In this paper, we use a un...

This paper studies the strategic foundations of the Representative Voter Theorem (Rothstein, 1991), also called the “second version” of the Median Voter Theorem. As a by-product, it also considers the existence of non-trivial strategy-proof social choice functions over the domain of single-crossing preference profiles. The main result presented here is that single-crossing preferences constitut...