Back to Black: The Median Voter Revisited

Mathieu Martin, Linus Thierry Nana Noumi, Zéphirin Nganmeni and Ashley Piggins ()
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Ashley Piggins: CY Cergy Paris Université, THEMA

No 2026-04, Thema Working Papers from THEMA (Théorie Economique, Modélisation et Applications), CY Cergy-Paris University, ESSEC and CNRS

Abstract: A long-standing foundational problem in the spatial theory of politics is the generic emptiness of the majority core when there is more than one dimension in the policy space. This implies that, in general, we cannot predict where win-motivated candidates will locate in an electoral contest decided by majority rule. We assume that the candidates face some uncertainty: they observe each voter’s ideal point in the policy space but not their indifference surfaces. Given any proper spatial voting game, we first identify the set of imprudent positions in the space. If a candidate adopts an imprudent position, then there exists a position for their opponent that will defeat them for certain. We introduce a new concept, the prudent core, as the set of positionsthat are not imprudent in this sense. We show that the prudent core is always non-empty. With majority voting and an odd number of voters, the prudent core equals the dimension-by-dimension median. The prudent core equals the majority core whenever the latter is nonempty.

Keywords: Spatial theory of politics; median voter theorem; prudent core; prudence (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D71 D72 D81 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mic
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ema:worpap:2026-04

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