Median Voter Theorem
Article
Median Voter Theorem is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between February 20, 2023 and October 23, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “A weak and fractious Democratic coalition plus a rock-hard conservative Republican non-coalition might be stable under Median Voter Theorem considerations”; “I call this the Median Voter Theorem”; “So maybe the Median Voter Theorem does work”. It most often appears alongside Apple, China, Middle East.
Metadata
- Category: Concepts
- Mention count: 3
- Issue count: 3
- First seen: February 20, 2023
- Last seen: October 23, 2024
Appears In
Related Pages
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- Apple (2 shared issues)
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- China (2 shared issues)
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- Middle East (2 shared issues)
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- Republican Party (2 shared issues)
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- Trump (2 shared issues)
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- 2020 election (1 shared issues)
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- 2020 primary (1 shared issues)
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- 23andme (1 shared issues)
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- ACTION TRANSFORMERS (1 shared issues)
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- Age of Miracles and Wonders (1 shared issues)
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- Air BnB (1 shared issues)
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- Alexander the Great (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
It will become more and more apparent that there are three separate groups: progressives, conservatives, and neoliberals. How exactly they sort themselves into two parties is going to be interesting. The easiest continuation-of-current-trends option is neoliberals+progressives vs. conservatives, with neoliberals+progressives winning easily. But progressives are starting to wonder if neoliberals’ support is worth the watering-down of their program, and neoliberals are starting to wonder if progressives’ support is worth constantly feeding more power to people they increasingly consider crazy. The Republicans used some weird demonic magic to hold together conservatives and neoliberals for a long time; I suspect the Democrats will be less good at this. A weak and fractious Democratic coalition plus a rock-hard conservative Republican non-coalition might be stable under Median Voter Theorem considerations. For like ten years. Until there are enough minorities that the Democrats are just overwhelmingly powerful (no, minorities are not going to start identifying as white and voting Republican en masse). I have no idea what will happen then. Maybe the Democrats will go extra socialist, the neoliberals and market minorities will switch back to the Republicans, and we can finally have normal reasonable class warfare again instead of whatever weird ethno-cultural thing is happening now?
(I posit that the Empire’s citizens chose to join Persia in a free and fair election; I call this the Median Voter Theorem)
The Median Voter Theorem says that, given some reasonable assumptions, the candidate closest to the beliefs of the median voter will win. So if candidates are rational, they’ll all end up at the same place on a one-dimensional political spectrum: the exact center.
Inline links: Median Voter Theorem
The real median voter theorem is much more complicated than this, and can handle arbitrary numbers of candidates and complex voting methods. But this argument is good enough for now.
First, candidates have to win a primary. In order to win the Democratic primary, the Median Voter theorem says you should match the belief of the median Democratic primary voter.