The current electoral situation in Brazil is a good example of the median voter theorem in action and how imperfect information on who exactly the median voter is causes different policies to emerge. Evidently, the fact that an election is a multi-policy (and in Brazil a multi-party) game, makes it difficult for us to use Downs' model without serious simplifications. That being said, this Bloomberg piece does a good job narrowing down the issue to "change or caution."
This notion of change vs. caution is interesting because in actuality, there is no such choice - the real choice Brazilians have is between change and more change, since the ongoing economic recession in the country has made "change" a necessary platform for rational candidates. That is, while we may not know exactly who the median voter is, he (she) wants change. In that sense, parties in Brazil are all running change-oriented platforms - some argue for more profound changes, some seek less change, but they all are attempting to find the exact balance that will allow the change-seeking yet risk adverse median voter to sympathize with them.
The fact that all parties advocate some form of moderate change - e.g. keeping up with social welfare programs while promoting anti-corruption legislation - shows us the attempt to cater towards a moderate voter. The fact that parties differ in their views of what constitutes moderate policies shows how it is difficult to be at the middle of the spectrum when you don't know where that middle is. That is, with pre-election polls constantly fluctuating it has been hard to decide which platform had the most strength, and in consequence we have seen a lot of strategic movements ahead of the election as parties fine-tune their propaganda. Now, as we head into the second round, the game shifts into a duopoly and participants are able to a) get a better idea of who the median voter is, and b) promote even bigger rhetorical shifts without loosing votes as easily as in a multiparty scenarios. In that sense, the next few weeks should provide us with a lot of interesting material, and perhaps even another blogpost.
1 comment:
I think Downs would argue that it makes sense that the many parties in Brazil are advocating for different types of change. One of the implications of his model is that when there are more than two parties, each party will try to remain as ideologically distinct from the other as possible. Downs would argue that if many political parties exist, there must be a distribution with many peaks or these parties will not last.
Perhaps in Brazil's case, it is not that all are attempting to advocate for the same change, and cannot identify what that would look like on a multiparty platform, but rather that they are each advocating a particular type of change that distinguishes them from the other candidates. Expect with the upcoming runoff that the change-ideologies of the leading two parties will converge to a more moderate position
Post a Comment