fabio guillermo rojas wrote:
>
> Let me elaborate some more. I think the MVT encourages us to think
> that democracy works by taking a random sample of voters and making
> policy the average response. If that were the case, democracy would
> clearly give us what the median voter wants.
>
> However, real world gov'ts take biased samples of the population.
> Some of it is in voting - poor people vote less, etc. At the very
> least, working democracy gives us biased samples and leads to
> policy defined by truncated distributions instead of the original
> distribution of preferences.
Any decent treatment of the MV states that it is the median *actual*
voter who matters, not the median *potential* voter. It's the Median
VOTER theorem, not the Median CITIZEN theorem, or the Median SENTIENT
BEING theorem.
> There are other sources of non-median-voterness in policy: organizational
> rules could encourage policy makers to take risks - they may not
> follow the median voters in exchange for personal benefit. Since
> voters have imperfect information and put weights on which policy
> is most important, this is a plausible risk. I bet many politicians
> routinely screw the median voter when they log-roll, or just hope
> they forget some votes.
The standard Wittmanian answer to this is as follows. If politicians
are usually able to screw the median voter without anyone noticing,
voters can still keep them in line by using a *probability multiplier*.
If politicians successfully avoid detection 95% of the time, just punish
them at 20x their gain if you get lucky and catch them. Private
employers fire sometimes fire a worker for playing Tetris, even though
most of the time people who play Tetris escape detection. Similarly,
voters could demonize a politician for a minor transgression.
This may sound like rational choice run amuck, but it does happen.
Politicians who use racial epithets are rarely recorded, but the chance
is not 0, and if voters find out, they often go ballistic. Many
politicians have ruined their careers with a minor slip of the tongue.
The real puzzle (which I take as further evidence of voter
irrationality) is that voters use optimal punishments for superficial,
trivial transgressions like saying one wrong word, but forgive
politicians for blatantly breaking campaign promises. Bush senior lost
after breaking his "no new taxes" pledge, but it was not a foregone
conclusion.
>
> Fabio
--
Prof. Bryan Caplan
Department of Economics George Mason University
http://www.bcaplan.com [EMAIL PROTECTED]
"He wrote a letter, but did not post it because he felt that no one
would have understood what he wanted to say, and besides it was not
necessary that anyone but himself should understand it."
Leo Tolstoy, *The Cossacks*
