The basic insight of the literature concerning the Median Voter Theorem and its applications, dating back to Black (1948), is that the policies implemented by di¤erent parties once in o¢ce should approach the median voter’s preferred policy if they run in a single-dimensional and democratic electoral space. This strong prediction has been challenged in recent years using arguments related to th...

Aspirations of the Middle Class: Voting on Redistribution and Status Concerns Kai A. Konrad and Florian Morath* This paper analyzes the role of narrowly selfish and other-regarding preferences for the median voter in a Meltzer-Richard (1981) framework. We use computerized and real human co-players to distinguish between these sets of motivations. Redistribution to real co-players has a negative...

The issue of political integration between two countries (more generally two political constituencies) for economic reasons is studied within the context of economic growth. We consider two countries which di¤er both in terms of average endowment and inequality. The decision to integrate or not is taken by the two national median voters. We establish the net gain for any individual in any count...

Voting algorithms are used to arbitrate between variant results in a wide range of highly dependable real-time control applications. These applications include N-Modular Redundant hardware systems and diversely designed software systems based on N-Version Programming. The most sophisticated and complex voting algorithms can even tolerate malicious (or Byzantine) variant errors. Voting algorithm...

A model which explains national-level house price appreciation through utility maximization by rational voters is developed and tested using a global sample of 40 democracies, in order to explain why some countries experienced house price bubbles in the past decade and others did not. In the model, a subsidy funded by a tax on all citizens can be provided to home buyers. The subsidy leads to an...

We explore a political-economy model of labor subsidies, extending Meltzer and Richard’s median-voter model to a dynamic setting. We explore only one source of heterogeneity: initial wealth. As a consequence, given an operative wealth effect, poorer agents work harder, and if the agent with median wealth is poorer than average, a politico-economic equilibrium will feature a subsidy to labor. Th...

The reformulation of the median voter hypothesis and its testing proposed in Milanovic (2000) has been criticized from four different perspectives. The critiques are discussed and assessed. JEL classification: D31, E62