In class today we talked about strategies for garnering the most votes assuming we know the preference peaks of individual voters. We showed that the best thing to do is to adopt the median position, which will inevitably gain the most votes. A natural thought that follows is a reflection on the current state of politics in the United States; that is, are candidates truly adopting the median position? If this were the case across all issues then we should be unable to distinguish any difference between the candidates, since a best response to a candidate adopting the median position is to adopt the same median position.

The political preference space is rather complicated, however, so a simpler thought would be to consider a specific issue: should candidates be in favor of heavily taxing the richest and redistributing the wealth? We know that the United States has a very aberrant distribution of wealth compared to the rest of the world, namely that an extremely small percentage of the population controls nearly all of the nation’s wealth. Barring the abnormality of the situation when compared with the rest of the world, we can most likely rationalize this result in the context of the “rich get richer” phenomenon we saw earlier in the class. Still, the present state of wealth distribution seems to be ultimately at odds with the median vote: consider that voters, regardless of their income, all have one vote that is the same weight–a tenet of the American electoral process.

So if we assume (fairly reasonably) that those with lower incomes would like to have the wealth distributed while those with higher incomes would not, then clearly the median preference would not fall within the range of those favoring the maintenance of the status quo. Personally, I don’t think I’ve ever heard about presidential candidates touting how they plan on redistributing the wealth in the United States upon taking office (I believe this is called “political suicide”)–so why is the median vote not the best strategy for candidates in this situation? A little searching led me to the following paper, which concerns itself with the same question:

http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p_mla_apa_research_citation/0/6/0/7/7/p60779_index.html

In accordance with our intuition, the paper emphasizes that while the logic of the median vote holds, the context in which it is applied is also important. The three main points it makes are:

• Contrary to what may have been the ideals of our forefathers, not everyone votes nor does every vote carry equal weight. It is conceivable that those with lower incomes may not exercise their vote either due to apathy or a feeling that nothing will change. Furthermore, as we have seen with recent elections, candidates need to raise an inordinate amount of money to even hold a campaign, so donations from the wealthy become very important; thus, the wealthy are in fact adding weight to their votes.
• Not every one understands economics, and so the assumption that voters have preference peaks about wealth redistribution may be flawed. The paper notes that “the basic dimension of politics is not the objective fact of family income; it is subjective preferences about economic issues.” It is certainly plausible that many voters don’t consider an issue rationally or thoughtfully beyond how they “feel” about it; candidates can therefore take advantage of adopting positions that are apparently appealing to a class of voters but not necessarily beneficial for them when considered beyond their surface value.
• Finally, as was pointed out in class, sometimes candidates really only care about winning; this means that appealing to the global median of voters may not entail the best result, since our political system is bipartisan. The “relevant median,” as the paper calls it, will often be different from the global median because candidates would rather place themselves at the median of their own political party, as they are less likely to attract the votes for those affiliated with an opposing party anyway.

The conclusion we might draw from these insights is that adopting a median position is only a good idea if we truly understand how the overall system behaves. Suppose you are a candidate running for a student assembly position here on campus–should you appeal to the median voter? The answer is of course “yes,” but something you might consider is that the apathy rate on campus is rather large and that maybe only 10 percent of students actually vote. It might therefore be a good strategy to first find out what kind of people are likely to vote, and then sample their preferences on issues and adopt the median of those results. This is of course assuming that you only want to win and have really no ideals of your own that you want to represent. Whether this is in fact the case is left as an exercise for the reader.