The Relative Importance of Ideology for Political Candidates

                      

To what extent do party platforms matter? Suzy Khimm of the Washington Post addresses the relationship between party platforms and the views and actions of individual candidates throughout the political process (article). Since 1972, changes have been made to the nomination process that favors more candidate driven elections. For candidates in a two-party system, what matters is not where exactly they sit on the spectrum of political ideology, but whether or not they capture more votes than the opposing candidate. According to the median voter theorem, espoused by Harold Hotelling and Anthony Downs, the tendency of political parties is to converge to a central, more moderate platform and thus acquire the largest percentage of voters by winning "the median voter" (assuming a unimodal distribution of voters, with the majority of the voters in the center). Khimm explains that “’the nominee knows that he cannot be punished or rewarded for following the party platform,’ and may break from the party to appeal to independent voters.” And according to Downs, it is advantageous for a candidate to profess an ambiguous and broad platform to appeal to these "independent" or "median" voters as competition forces parties towards an equilibrium. It makes sense that candidates would seek to position themselves ideologically where they can potentially win the most voters.

But doesn't this tendency to move towards the middle alienate those at the relative extremes on the political spectrum? Don’t the two parties become eerily similar as they approach the middle? According to Khimm, “Even those who don’t believe platforms are all that significant agree they’re useful for at least one thing: highlighting the baseline differences between the two parties.” Not only do party platforms highlight the differences and so distinguish one candidate from another, they also hold candidates accountable to the ideologies they profess and the many promises they make during campaigns. Downs claims that voters must be able to detect the side of the midpoint on which a candidates falls, which is in part determined by the "extremist policies" the candidates espouses. Even voters at either end of the spectrum might agree that given two candidates, they would prefer the candidate who is relatively closer to their political ideology to win the election. Candidates have to position themselves centrally, but they also must be identifiable with their party's platform.