Median Voter Theoreom: WRONG!

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Whenever someone criticizes the current state of affairs of politics or the action of politicians, pundits and the corporate media typically decry the electorate. This is based on a fundamentally wrong view of how electoral politics works - the Median Voter Theorem.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFt0k6n_HKc[/youtube]

How do the underlying assumptions break down in reality? Well....

• There isn't a uniform ideological spectrum. They're been social ultraconservatives on this board who advocated for things like a job guarantee (generally considered a pretty leftwing view). Likewise, they are right-libertarians in the US who want complete deregulation of the marketplace while opposing socially conservative mores.
• People don't have well-defined policy preferences on many issues, they can be swung to one side or the other on the basis of framing and many issues people just don't care about.
• There isn't a one-to-one relationship between willingness to vote for a politician and support a given public policy they advocate. Sometimes people will vote simply on character issues or trust (as in "conviction politics"). Swing voters, in particular, like clear positions they might disagree as opposed to muddled positions they may be more sympathetic to.
• Information isn't free - sometimes, given the ineffectualness of an individual vote, it makes sense to be ignorant of the issues ("rational ignorance") as the marginal cost of gaining the information well out-weights the marginal benefit of acting upon it.
• Coalitions and corporations, on the other hand, do have the resources and sway for which it'd make sense to incur the costs of gaining info so as to act upon it.

I think 2, 3, and 5 are your better arguments.

The notion of a median doesn't require a strict left-right scale, but we'd get the same kind of conception, even if political distribution 2 dimensional or 3 dimensional, as really the issue is just capturing as much of the cluster of votes as possible, and the cluster centers on the middle.

The issue of the freedom of information only works as a supporting argument for 5. However, it, in and of itself, doesn't really change how a politician is viewed. Often policy alignment is a matter of fitting into an ideology, and identifying an ideology isn't usually the most difficult thing to do. Politicians sell themselves more on ideology(which people can understand) than policy(which people get more perplexed about sometimes).

It's still pretty wrong.

It is certainly wrong, it is full of logically inconsistent jumps and flawed reasoning.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFVPAT8Dd3A[/youtube]