Essay on BJP election prospects
BJP is a captive of the Median Voter Theorem
For the BJP to rule India, it needs to first understand that it is a prisoner of two captors - the Median Voter Theorem and Statistics - and then plan an escape.
The Median Voter Theorem states that in a majority election, if voter policy preferences can be represented points along a single axis, then voters vote deterministically for the politician who commits to a policy position closest to their preference. To paraphrase this, the median voter decides election outcomes. So if it’s a two-horse race (say Congress v. BJP), then the politician who commits to the policy position preferred by the median voter wins. This means that if either candidate commits to a policy position away from the median, that candidate receives less than half the vote.
So who is the median voter in India? That depends on various factors like age, wealth, caste, education, social standing, interests, location, and so on. But most importantly, the median voter is one who sits in the middle of a policy spectrum. Let’s illustrate this using income tax policy. On the extreme right of the policy spectrum would be voters who believe income taxes should be abolished (the libertarians) and on the extreme left would be voters who believe taxes should be very high (the egalitarians). And in the middle sits the median voter who believes in moderate taxes (to finance our corpulent state).
Now for a short lesson in Statistics. Applying the Law of Large Numbers and the Central Limit Theorem, given our 1.2 billion population which includes 400 million actual voters, the expectation is that for any policy that politicians choose to espouse from their pulpits, voters will form a normal distribution (recollect the bell-shaded curve?). This means that the number of voters around the median will far outnumber those at the left and right.
So now who determines the final policy? The voter in the middle. Any other policy will yield less than 50%
For the BJP to rule India, it needs to first understand that it is a prisoner of two captors - the Median Voter Theorem and Statistics - and then plan an escape.
The Median Voter Theorem states that in a majority election, if voter policy preferences can be represented points along a single axis, then voters vote deterministically for the politician who commits to a policy position closest to their preference. To paraphrase this, the median voter decides election outcomes. So if it’s a two-horse race (say Congress v. BJP), then the politician who commits to the policy position preferred by the median voter wins. This means that if either candidate commits to a policy position away from the median, that candidate receives less than half the vote.
So who is the median voter in India? That depends on various factors like age, wealth, caste, education, social standing, interests, location, and so on. But most importantly, the median voter is one who sits in the middle of a policy spectrum. Let’s illustrate this using income tax policy. On the extreme right of the policy spectrum would be voters who believe income taxes should be abolished (the libertarians) and on the extreme left would be voters who believe taxes should be very high (the egalitarians). And in the middle sits the median voter who believes in moderate taxes (to finance our corpulent state).
Now for a short lesson in Statistics. Applying the Law of Large Numbers and the Central Limit Theorem, given our 1.2 billion population which includes 400 million actual voters, the expectation is that for any policy that politicians choose to espouse from their pulpits, voters will form a normal distribution (recollect the bell-shaded curve?). This means that the number of voters around the median will far outnumber those at the left and right.
So now who determines the final policy? The voter in the middle. Any other policy will yield less than 50%