--- fabio guillermo rojas <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: "4. Cognitive limitations: I'm no expert, but my hunch is that many people are only willing to get worked up over a small # of issues - taxes, abortion, immigration, defense... and the dedicated might add their favorites like gun control or affirmative action. Therefore, it's no risk to screw the voter on an issue as long as you don't do it on certain big issues. Therefore it's easy to get a list of dozens of issues and find a descrepancy - what's so puzzling about that?"
You mean litmus-test issues that people value above all else? Abortion is a good example. There seems to be alot of people who will choose to not vote for a candidate because of her stance on abortion, regardless of her stance on all other issues. So litmus-test issues could throw off the MVT because that issue decides who one will vote for before any other issue will be considered. I think this criticism fails because the winning candidate would be the candidate who chooses the median vector. That is, she chooses the median for the biggest litmus test issue, then the second biggest, and on down the line. Of course my criticism of your criticism would fail for issues that are under the radar of most people. At which point I would just be wasting bandwidth. But I do have a naive question: Is there a median voter for each issue, so that if there n issues, there can be up to n median voters? Or, is there only one median voter who satisfies the vector median as I described above? Can such a person be proven to exist, sort of like a voter version of the Ham Sandwich Theorem? Humbly yours, jsh ===== "...for no one admits that he incurs an obligation to another merely because that other has done him no wrong." -Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, Discourse 16. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Finance - Get real-time stock quotes http://finance.yahoo.com
