Testing the Median Voter Model and Moving Beyond its Limits: Do Characteristics of Politicians Matter?

Marco Portmann and David Stadelmann

CREMA Working Paper Series from Center for Research in Economics, Management and the Arts (CREMA)

Abstract: We exploit a natural measure of congruence between politicians and their constituency' bnm bnnb fgvhjuis preferences to directly quantify the extent of legislative shirking and evaluate the mechanism of the median voter model. The median voter model explains the behavior of politicians with respect to revealed preferences of their constituency about 18.8 percentage points better than a random decision benchmark. However, it fails to account for a substantial part of its theoretical prediction of convergence. Nevertheless, competition for voters under majority rule crowds out individual charact eristics and party affiliations as potential factors which explain legislative shirking.

Keywords: Constituents' Preferences; Median Voter Model; Political Economy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D7 H7 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

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