1. Criticisms of the median voter theorem.
2. Tim Harford on *Create Your Own Economy*.
3. Taiwan starts to legalize prostitution.
4. Is there discrimination against female playwrights? There is a new economics study and you can read more here. I cannot find a link to the original research. Update: found here.
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/theater/Openingthecurtain.pdf
hmm, it’s interesting reading this discussion of the mvt, as a political scientist. Probably when we ape economics ideas it looks the same.
The most direct applications of the mvt (it’s just a subgame concept, really) typically show up in comparative politics in studies of redistribution (i.e. Biox, Democracy and Redistribution, Franzese, Macroeconomic Policies of Developed Democracies, Meltzer and Richards, etc etc etc). Not many political scientists would directly apply the mvt directly to Congress in some sort of meta game of policy. Moreover, a pretty large amount of evidence exists to suggest that its pretty hard to define what exactly the “median voter” is in a given district. Which voters are pivotal? Evidence suggests that voters with mobile capital are typically a lot more influential than any scores of voters. But that’s neither here nor there, in some sense, because preferences are pretty well fixed at this point. Politicians probably know the outcome they’d like to see (or what would make their own electoral chances more stable).
If we want to make a game of Congress’s attitude towards this policy, we’d need a couple of pieces of information, basically the veto actors (subcommittees, the president), the structure of the game (who moves when), the preferences of the actors involved (probably dw-nominate), the location of the status quo (we can probably guess that, pretty far right). Given that, we could probably establish a winning set of policy locations that would give us an idea if any proposal could happen which will substantively change the existing policy. Anecdotally, these sorts of games do a pretty good job of predicting short term political outcomes. Bruce Bueno de Mesquita has a model that he claims solves this stuff with some 95% accuracy rate or something like that, though he’s hush hush about his model so that he can get government contracts. The game, however, could basically be summed up by a simple extensive form game.
Maybe if I get bored I’ll chart out a quick game of it and put it online. I don’t think I could put confidence intervals around the estimates (I’d have to bootstrap the nominate scores and that is computationally intensive), but it would be enlightening.
Moral of the story, the mvt is just a tool for more complicated games. Applying the mvt in this way is about 30-40 years behind the curve of political science (mvt discussions beget arrow’s theorem, which beget work by Riker, which beget work by Shepsle, which beget a lot of current political science).
The great thing about the internet is that I just spent 15 minutes writing this and no one will care.
The median voter theorem is true. The question is ‘when does it apply’? Even if it does not apply it is important to understand why. This paper breaks down virtually every assumption and talks about papers that explore them.
DOWNS AND TWO-PARTY CONVERGENCE
Bernard Grofman
Annual Review of Political Science
Vol. 7: 25-46 (Volume publication date May 2004)
(doi:10.1146/annurev.polisci.7.012003.104711)
I responded to Ms. Sands study here. please read my blog post and tell me what you think
http://passingscenecafe.blogspot.com/2009/06/gender-bias-in-theater.html
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