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Al Barger and MoreThings - getting people's goats since 1998.
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October 30, 2002
Republicans, Democrats, and Median Mediocrity
Jacob Levy has an intriguing post on the calculations of American electoral politics, based on a 1957 academic thesis called Anthony Downs Median Voter Theory. "In a competitive two-party system with a unidimensional political spectrum (and some other technical constraints) the parties will tend to converge around the preferences of the 50%+1th voter." He goes on to analyze some of how this has played out in the last 10 years of national politics.
The basic idea seems pretty unassailable. The two parties will tend to cluster as close to the exact center of voter preferences as they can calculate from their finely tuned opinion polls.
This means that they will tend to be very close to saying the exact same things most of the time, which leaves the voters with little if any real choice. You could say this acts as an academic explanation of George Wallace's famous comment about there not being a dime's worth of difference between the parties.
This also underscores one of my ongoing points about the importance of third parties. Even if they rarely actually win and take office, they serve a vital function in pulling the Republicans and Democrats apart, making them pay some attention to their "base voters," as some have put it. For example, a staunch pro-gun Libertarian threatening to draw even three or four percent can stiffen the spine of some Republican jackass tempted to support another round of "sensible gun control."
posted by Al at 10/30/2002 01:28:00 PM
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