Scott asks why, if the Median Voter Theorem is true, American politicians aren't all middle of the road, and barely distinguishable from each other.

Elegant as this proof may be, it fails to describe the real world. Democrats and Republicans don’t have platforms exactly identical to each other and to the exact most centrist American. Instead, Democrats are often pretty far left, and Republicans pretty far right. What's going on?

He suggests a number of reasons. And they're all probably true at the margin. But there's a much more basic reason why parties aren't clones of each other: preferences are correlated.

I'm going to give a really simple toy example, and we're going to see that correlated preferences + first pass the post is enough to blow the Median Voter Theorem out of the water.

Let's pretend there's only two issues that matter to the American voter. Immigration, and [...]

The original text contained 3 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

The original text contained 1 image which was described by AI.

---

First published:
November 3rd, 2024

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/oxyGrTczrgjGodWAh/why-our-politicians-aren-t-median

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

---

Images from the article:

Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

“Why our politicians aren’t Median” by Yair Halberstadt 06:47 Share

LessWrong (30+ Karma)

Shownotes Transcript

“Why our politicians aren’t Median” by Yair Halberstadt