ISC and the MVT

This past week, I attended the elections for the new executive board of the Inter-sorority Council and found that the Hotelling-Downs model of voting seemed to hold even within the small-scale elections of Greek life. In these elections, all fifteen chapters had representatives present with one vote for their individual chapter, as well as the ISC executive board holding one collective vote. 

In this particular election, all 15 sororities present had different preferences and desires for the ISC President to fulfill based on their chapter experiences, but there was no clear ideological spectrum because of the lack of any real party affiliation. Being that no abstentions were allowed and preferences for the candidates were somewhat symmetrical and unimodal amongst the chapters, the obvious strategy for all candidates would be to deliver speeches and platforms that appealed to the majority of voters. Because both candidates' platforms were completely mobile due to a lack of party affiliation, Harold Hotelling's principle of minimal differentiation resulted in the two candidates' speeches and platforms being almost completely identical and open-ended, presenting very similar ideas and plans for the ISC's upcoming year. 

Downs’ "The Statics and Dynamics of Party Ideologies" describes this occurrence by revealing that in this particular two party system, the candidates had an incentive to give broad, open-ended speeches, in order to discourage rational voting amongst the chapters based on policy. This is because when voters perceived both presidential candidates as having similar platforms, they were not able to actually differentiate the policies presented, and instead had to cast their vote for a candidate based on other factors such as social connections or superficial factors. Perhaps this could be the reason that so many small-scale student government elections can be decided on some pretty biased factors.