The median voter model

Abstract

Most analytical work in public choice is based upon relatively simple models of majority decision making. These models are widely used even though the researchers know that real political settings are more complex than the models seem to imply. The use of such simple models can be defended for a variety of reasons: First, simple models allow knowledge to be transmitted more economically from one person to another than possible with more complex models. Second, simple models provide us with engines of analysis that allow a variety of hypotheses about more complex phenomena to be developed, many of which would be impossible (or uninteresting) without the frame of reference provided by models. Third, it is possible that simple models are all that is necessary to understand the main features of the world. The world may be less complex that it appears; in which case simple models that extract the essential from the observed will serve us well.