As we approach Election Day, President Obama and Gov. Mitt
Romney claim that the American electorate will have a clear choice between two
competing visions for the country.
This analysis, however, argues that Gov. Romney has repositioned
himself near the middle of the political spectrum, a common move for
politicians, according to political experts. They claim,
“It's not that unusual for a candidate to…move toward the center as a general election nears. The idea is to capture undecided voters, who generally are found in the middle, political experts say.”
Public
choice economists would not fault Mr. Romney for his
strategic shift.
The
Median Voter Theorem holds that, under certain specific assumptions, two
candidates will converge near the middle of the political spectrum, since the
median voter will decide the election outcome. One of the key assumptions in the model requires a unimodal,
symmetric distribution of voters.
A cursory look at the composition of the American electorate may suggest
that the electorate is not unimodal; rather, it may have two modes, one representing
each political ideology. Even with
2 modes, however, as long as the distribution is symmetric, the MVT still
applies, and Gov. Romney is acting rationally by trying to capture the median
voter. While moving to the middle,
however, he still tries to appeal to the extreme right, as evidenced by his
“47%” comments, in an attempt to hold on to their votes.
In
conclusion, it would not be unreasonable to apply this analysis to President
Obama as well. The article claims
that liberals are upset with Obama for claiming that he and Romney have similar
positions on social security, but, according to the MVT, given the American
electorate, it is certainly in Obama’s interest to move towards the middle to
capture the crucial median voter.
1 comment:
Another example of Romney moving to the middle (which follows the Median Voter Theorem) was shown in the Presidential debate. According to an Op-Ed in the New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/opinion/sunday/friedman-can-i-phone-a-friend.html), it was the first time Romney spoke to the American people at large rather than a subset of Republican voters.
As a result, “[Romney] didn’t have to worry about the nut balls he was running against in the G.O.P. primary and was not forced to cater just to the Tea Party base. So he finally took out the Etch a Sketch and moved to the center.”
While Mr. Friedman (the author of the op-ed) shows some disdain for Romney’s swerve center, from an economics’ prospective, it is perfectly rational for Romney to adjust his policies for the United States presidential election. After all, the very first assumption of the Median Voter Theorem is that candidates are vote maximizers, and therefore create their policies on what gives them the best chance of winning the election (rather than on what they actually believe). When Romney was running in the primaries, the median voter for the Republican primaries was further right than the median voter is in the general election due to the large Tea Party base. As a result, it makes sense that Romney’s policies would be more conservative, reflecting his attempts to gain the vote of the Republican median voter and therefore win the primaries. Following the Republican National Convention, Romney is now officially the only Republican candidate. Therefore, it is not surprising that his policies have adjusted accordingly and become centered.
Post a Comment