I mentioned before certain methods of voting. I would like
to continue by discussing an outcome of more strategic behavior
that candidates and voters try to take advantage of. "The median voter theorem"
is a model which is often used. As I have been discussing, it
is obvious that collective decisions cannot give everyone what
they want. People with atypical preferences will not be as pleased
as those whose preferences are more average. Let's assume a situation
of direct democracy, where the voters vote directly on issues,
and laws are made by the voters (imagine a town meeting). Also
assume that there are three people. Each person takes into account
the benefit they expect from the service and their personal tax
cost. The issue at hand is one about police services. The greater
the amount of police service, the more benefit each individual
receives, and thus a larger tax bill will need to be paid by each
as well. No one wants to have a society with no police, but there
is definitely an optimal level of spending for each voter, and
an individual's preferences are less well satisfied if spending
is either less than this optimal amount or more than this amount.
The farther away the majority choice is from an individual's optimum,
the less well off the individual is in relation to it. The median
voter would refer to the one whose optimum lies in the middle
of the group. If the voters vote according to simple majority
rule and act independently of each other through an exhaustive
vote, and the cost of voting is small, the median voter theorem
states that under specific conditions the outcome of an exhaustive
majority vote on an issue will be the optimum of the median voter.
Interestingly, a lot of empirical research has actually been
built on this model. It has been found to be useful in predicting
the size of school budgets, government policies on conservation,
etc… and it even can explain why political parties choose
to opt for certain platforms and positions that are similar to
each other.
But how desirable is the median outcome? Does it lead to good
or bad results? We assumed simple majority voting, and as a result
it was the median voter's preference that dominated and decided
what would be done. But is this the best policy for the community?
We have to compare the benefits among the individuals-that is
to say we need to see how important one person's benefit from
voting is in relation to another person's. If we make the assumption
that the collective benefit needs to be maximized then we can
say that the median voter's optimum would be best but only if
2 conditions hold: 1) voters
have roughly the same intensity of preferences or 2)
that the voters to the left of the median feel just about as strongly
as the voters to the right (symmetrical). But if the intensities
of the individuals differ a lot, then the median outcome would
not be desirable. And unfortunately in the real world when we
do get away from the "perfect" models we see that the
intensities of individual preferences do differ a bit. Plus, real
voting and real elections are much more complex than these simple
models would lead us to believe and many more factors play in
to the final outcomes.
Voters in modern democracies are interested in many issues.
Therefore we must ask if the median voter model is useful in describing
more realistic situations. The answer is yes and no. The center
of the issue is not really the same as the median voter's preference
on one issue. It refers to a sort of average on many issues. It
is unlikely that the median voter would be the median voter on
every issue. A candidate aims to construct a platform that will
maximize their probability of being elected. The center opinion
strategy is one that is formed to try to appeal to the center
opinion not the median per se.
Voters, like consumers, make errors, and many politicians have
developed ways to prompt mistakes and exploit them. They know
that voters are uncertain about which candidate is most likely
to act in their interest, so they try to give voters information
to distinguish them from other candidates in the most attractive
manner possible. They take lessons in speech-writing, hire expert
writers, advertise, get endorsements from pressure groups and
other people, etc… In other words, they try their best to
discover and exploit the sociological factors that influence voters'
decisions to vote. All of these things require money. As they
use their own personal funds up they try to raise additional funds.
They try to appeal to "special interest groups." These
people then make a contribution because they believe that they
will be treated favorably by the government bureau. In the case
of a legislator, the special interest group contributes to a campaign
fund in exchange for the candidate's promise to vote for or against
particular bills and policies.