The Median Voter Theorem is an interesting result in the theory of democracy that ought to form a prominent piece in the bedrock of any discussion of electoral politics. The result, in short, is that in certain conditions, two political parties will each take all voters on each side of the median voter, and they will both serve the desires of the median voter. The theorem could use some strengthening; its assumptions are rather ambitious, but it is likely that a slightly weaker version is true in many more circumstances. Let’s look at some of the obvious implications of the theorem:
The Left party and Right party will always be approximately equally matched. If the population moves left, and the Right party stays the same, it loses voters, but it can move left and force the other party to the left to steal swing votes. This way you can’t really get a situation where the Right party never wins again because the population has moved left; it can always play catch-up.
Capturing and moving the Right party rightwards is completely futile. All it does is lose votes and cause the left to win that cycle. (Capturing and moving the Right party left of the Left party breaks the model. I’ll need to use a more advanced model to explore this…)
Because the policies of the parties are dictated by the median voter, the only serious way to influence the policies of the government is to capture and move the population. Dissolving the government and installing another is downstream of dissolving the people and installing another.
It is helpful to separate “Electoral Parties”, the goal of which is self-preservation and winning elections, from serious “Political Parties”, the goal of which is to capture and influence the government. They are not the same thing. Electoral parties craft a platform to appeal to their half of the median voter. Political parties (in their democratic activities) take actions to influence the median position of the population. Electoral politics is downstream of serious political activity; getting into electoral politics is usually a waste of time unless your electoral party is also a serious political organization.
Actions taken to change the affiliation of the population (changing or polishing the image of the electoral party, etc) are limited and futile, and cannot influence the overall direction of the political zeitgeist. This kind of action can only retard or advance the zeitgeist by a constant amount, and waste funds.
Methods of influencing the median voter, in other words, serious democratic political activism, include:
- Immigration of foreign populations to sympathetic to the target policies, and emigration of local unsympathetic populations, to move the index of the median voter.
- Capturing and influencing the propaganda and educational institutions that dictate what the population thinks, to move the position of the median voter.
- Increasing the reach of propaganda institutions favourable to your preferred policies. For example, compulsory public school.
- Expanding or retracting the franchise among different groups of the population.
- Fostering dependence on your target policies, or policies likely to be associated with your target policies. For example, contemporary American leftists can get more populations on various forms of welfare, or involved in deviant lifestyles, and rightists can get more people in contact with business laws, starting nuclear families, involved in traditional religious activities, owning guns.
- If playing the longer game, encouraging fertility among sympathetic populations, discouraging fertility among unsympathetic populations.
- Building institutions and spaces that are likely to move people’s opinions in a particular direction. More comments on this complex topic later.
- Pass laws that make your preferred policies the status quo
Note that only a few of the above actually require the government in the loop. The rest are helped by government power, but could be done by any powerful group, even one that nominally has nothing to do with electoral politics.
In the modern United States, we see the effective strategies being mostly used by the left, with the right playing electoral catch-up. If the democratic right were serious, they would focus less on direct electoral politics, and more on actions from the above list.