Testing political economy’s ‘as if’ proposition: is the median income voter really decisive?

Robert Inman

Public Choice, 1978, vol. 33, issue 4, 45-65

Abstract: Recent empirical and normative analysis of local government fiscal performance has made good use of the Downsian median voter model as a behavioral specification for how local fiscal allocations are decided. The central assumption behind all these studies is that the median voter is the family with the median income. This paper statistically tests the validity of this assumption for a sample of 58 Long Island school districts. For at most 1/4 of the districts can we reject the assumption, and even for these districts, the predictive bias of the median-income-voter-as-decisive assumption never exceeds 20%. Copyright Springer 1978

Date: 1978
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (32)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/BF03187595 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:pubcho:v:33:y:1978:i:4:p:45-65

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... ce/journal/11127/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/BF03187595

Access Statistics for this article

Public Choice is currently edited by WIlliam F. Shughart II

More articles in Public Choice from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().