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

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  • Marco Portmann
  • David Stadelmann

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.

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  • Marco Portmann & David Stadelmann, 2013. "Testing the Median Voter Model and Moving Beyond its Limits: Do Characteristics of Politicians Matter?," CREMA Working Paper Series 2013-05, Center for Research in Economics, Management and the Arts (CREMA).
    • Handle: RePEc:cra:wpaper:2013-05
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    Cited by:

    1. Niklas Potrafke, 2013. "Evidence on the political principal-agent problem from voting on public finance for concert halls," Constitutional Political Economy, Springer, vol. 24(3), pages 215-238, September.
    2. Benesch, Christine & Bütler, Monika & Hofer, Katharina E., 2018. "Transparency in parliamentary voting," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 163(C), pages 60-76.
    3. Hofer. Katharina, 2016. "Shirk or Work? On How Legislators React to Monitoring," Economics Working Paper Series 1616, University of St. Gallen, School of Economics and Political Science.

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Constituents' Preferences; Median Voter Model; Political Economy;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D7 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making
    • H7 - Public Economics - - State and Local Government; Intergovernmental Relations

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