I haven’t had a chance to listen to the podcast yet, but I’ll give a couple first-thought responses.
(0) I don’t know why (or even whether) Berkowitz doesn’t address the MVT, but my impression is that the assumptions baked into the MVT are out of touch with reality; consider for example that people may rationally vote “irrationally” (see e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_the_Rational_Voter), since national democracy does not have reliable feedback mechanisms for making good choices with your vote. Of course, that’s not to say that MVT is totally wrong; it could be decently “right for the wrong reasons,” but I’ve increasingly heard people argue that the MVT is losing accuracy as politics is increasingly detached from policy effectiveness. Also, just casually glancing over the transcript it seems like Berkowitz indirectly touches on the notion by emphasizing how party primaries encourage selecting more-partisan candidates (“they really talk about the problem of partisan primaries”), although perhaps Berkowitz should have given some more-explicit (i.e., by-name) discussion to this.
(2) This analysis feels really shallow, and I’m not sure it’s fair to Berkowitz based on what I’m seeing on the transcript. In fact, looking at a few quotes it even feels a bit misrepresentative of what Berkowitz said. From the transcript: “So I do think political reforms are important here. I’m a little agnostic personally about which ones, we could talk more about this, but I do think some reforms to the system are really key to get at the structures there as well.”
Further on this, Berkowitz gives counterexamples of where he claims parliamentary democracies have led to “populism”, including the UK and Australia; you can’t just say “well here are a few examples of where parliamentary democracy has worked very well; it clearly has to do with their structure.” (In the case of Japan, I’d immediately suspect there are massive confounding variables, including having one of the most homogeneous populations in the world as well as having been highly economically successful)
(3) I haven’t fully read/analyzed this section of Berkowitz’ talk, but I think that once again this is some shallow/hasty dismissal: “turnout wasn’t high in Trump 1.0, so Trump can’t be responsible for higher turnout in Trump 2.0” is not a knock-down argument in itself. It’s wholly possible that Trump was so polarizing after 4 additional years of hogging the limelight that he had an upward effect on turnout. However, I do agree it’s probably not the most persuasive argument—but I don’t think that you ought to be so confident in your own analysis, either. Having not done serious research on the matter, it still seems more likely that the expansion of mail-in/absentee voting also had a sizable upward effect. In the end, all three of our explanations could be right. Perhaps Berkowitz should have mentioned your point, perhaps it wasn’t that crucial.
In summary, I’d say it’s easy to pick apart any political pundit’s analysis; I imagine when I listen to this podcast I’ll have a number of criticisms. However, I think it’s also important to apply similar scrutiny to our own criticisms.
I’ll need to edit the piece more deeply, but for now I’ve added an explanation at the top.
Here are some counter criticisms
That is a great summary of the modern critique of the MVT, thanks for sharing. The problem is that it applies to policy outcomes, but the subject is candidate selection. Caplan’s criticism is that voters are irrational at connecting votes to policies and policies to outcomes, which is true. If voters have a simpler utility function like “I want to vote against any anti-Trump candidates”, the median voter will apply very well. If 51% of voters choose to vote against any anti-trump candidates and you are anti-trump, the MVT will still cook your goose. Compare with democratic primaries, where the Bernie faction mobilized 40%, but Bernie does not have 4/5s of Trumps influence at all.
The response concerns me because Berkowitz passes up a great opportunity to explain a fundamental dynamic of the system in question. Imagine asking an economist “why did the price of gasoline increase when supply contracted” and the economist didn’t mention supply and demand curves. Sure it could be a Giffen good with a weird speculative market, but your explanation should start with the theory that explains maximum variation, then move to edge cases.
Saying there is no silver bullet is a strong positive claim that Berkowitz doesn’t back up. I’m not all claiming there is definitive evidence that a silver bullet exists. I am simply claiming that we have not seen evidence disproving silver bullets, which Berkowitz claims. I should have made that more clear.
Viz-a-viz populism, if we define populism as “did any populist party form” then yes, there are few patterns. Martin Gurri is probably right that populism emerges from the information environment. But if we define it as populists that cam close to ruling, by getting 20% of the vote share, then we have some patterns. The German Bundestag was stunningly successful at deescalating every issue that the populists could use after 2016, for example (they paid billions to keep refugees out of Europe). Keeping populists out of office can probably be done with electoral engineering, but keeping populist minorities from forming can’t, so depends on goal post definitions.
Fair enough, I shouldn’t argue that policy feedback is the definitive reason and Trump not. I’m just concerned that Berkowitz doesn’t mention other explanations. Generally I am suspicious that activists will overfit on data to make their issue seem really important.
Thanks for the responses. To go through the points you mention:
I’m just not that convinced that the MVT is akin to the gas price situation you described, in that I don’t see it as that explanatory/fundamental/crucial to mention (in combination with the following remarks). Importantly, as part of this I’ll say that it seems like you’re watering down the MVT to increasingly become “politicians try to appeal to the majority of people,” which is arguably far more intuitive and thus less necessary to cover in name/detail. As I understood it, the MVT is more meant to explain why politicians converge to more-moderate policy preferences in order to win over the “median” voter. So if you’re just going to say (e.g.) that “candidates were less inclined to be anti-Trump because a majority of people wanted to vote against the anti-trump candidates,” you don’t need to mention the phrase “Median voter theorem” any more than you actually have to mention “supply and demand ** curves/graphs ** “ (as opposed to just “supply and demand”).
I’m still not convinced there is a silver bullet, and my base rate for “situations where there is actually a silver bullet despite the dismissal by people who are more experienced than me, yet it’s just not getting used” is really low. Thus, I’m inclined to side with Berkowitz on this—including his observation that there are definitely multiple helpful reforms that could be taken.
If the situation is as you described it, I definitely think that’s a fair concern—and it’s something that I’ve seen too many pundits do.
The median voter theorem is just a mathematical conclusion from a set of simple assumptions, it can’t be watered up or down. If some set of voters rank proposals on a single axis with single-peaked preferences then the only Condorcet winner will be the median voters ideal point. The key here is that the voters choose the axis on which to rank the proposals. The voters can rank the candidates on any axis, taxes or policies or height. Usually smarter actors rank proposals and candidates on an ideology axis by collapsing issues onto one axis, as a mental heuristic. But if they interpret the axis as “does he run ads where he shoots guns” instead of “does he vote for my tax rate”, the gun ads determine the axis not the tax rate. In this case the assumption is that Republican primary voters care a lot about the Trump-support axis.
The two level game papers are cool, but not relevant here.
The MVT is important here because Trumps influence over represenatives is non-linear with his vote share. If Trump loses 20% of his primary influence and loses the median primary voter, he does not lose 20% of his influence, he loses most of his influence.
1, The “watering down” comment was really referring to the idea of expanding the “preference axis” assumption to include more than just policy, to the extent that MVT changes from “Politicians moderate their policies towards the center of policy axes” (which would be a perhaps unintuitive claim that doesn’t need explicit reference to “MVT”) to “Politicians appeal to the majority of the voting public” (which is almost “no-duh” except that it irons over potential wrinkles, like “someone who is very far right/left won’t even bother voting unless one of the candidates moves far enough towards them, rather than spending their time to go out and vote for the ‘less bad candidate’ in an election which they might deep down recognize they won’t actually have any impact on...”).
Ultimately, I think the question of whether Berkowitz should have discussed MVT by name is less important that the question of MVT’s validity, but I’m not in an epistemic position to get deeper into the weeds on that. 😶
2. I still don’t see that as a true “silver bullet”; I imagine Berkowitz might consider it one of the potential positive reforms, though.
Original median voter theorem paper, Duncan Black in 1948
Let us suppose that a decision is to be determined by vote of a committee. The
members of the committee may meet in a single room, or they may be scattered
over an area of the country as are the electors in a parliamentary constituency.
Proposals are advanced, we assume, in the form of motions on a particular topic
or in favor of one of a number of candidates. We do not inquire into the genesis
of the motions but simply assume that given motions have been put forward.
In the case of the selection of candidates, we assume that determinate candidates
have offered themselves for election and that one is to be chosen by means of
voting. For convenience we shall speak as if one of a number of alternative mo-
tions, and not candidates, was being selected.
Let there be n members in the committee, where n is odd. We suppose that
an ordering of the points on the horizontal axis representing motions exists,
rendering the preference curves of all members single-peaked. The points on
the horizontal axis corresponding to the members’ optimums are named O, 02,
03, . . . , in the order of their occurrence. The middle or median optimum
will be the (n + I)/2th, and, in Figure 3, only this median optimum, the one im-
mediately above it and the one immediately below it are shown
Anyway, this is really a pedagogic question. How best should we teach politics? Some people advocate that we should disregard the MVT because it is both “obvious” and “false”. Setting that contradiction aside, I think the underlying assumption that only theories with perfect data fit should be taught is wrong. By the same logic, physics should not teach Newtownian mechanics because it is wrong relative to quantum mechanics. You can’t just give the reader quantum mechanics, you need to start with a theory they can understand then update it.
I haven’t had a chance to listen to the podcast yet, but I’ll give a couple first-thought responses.
(0) I don’t know why (or even whether) Berkowitz doesn’t address the MVT, but my impression is that the assumptions baked into the MVT are out of touch with reality; consider for example that people may rationally vote “irrationally” (see e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_the_Rational_Voter), since national democracy does not have reliable feedback mechanisms for making good choices with your vote. Of course, that’s not to say that MVT is totally wrong; it could be decently “right for the wrong reasons,” but I’ve increasingly heard people argue that the MVT is losing accuracy as politics is increasingly detached from policy effectiveness. Also, just casually glancing over the transcript it seems like Berkowitz indirectly touches on the notion by emphasizing how party primaries encourage selecting more-partisan candidates (“they really talk about the problem of partisan primaries”), although perhaps Berkowitz should have given some more-explicit (i.e., by-name) discussion to this.
(2) This analysis feels really shallow, and I’m not sure it’s fair to Berkowitz based on what I’m seeing on the transcript. In fact, looking at a few quotes it even feels a bit misrepresentative of what Berkowitz said. From the transcript: “So I do think political reforms are important here. I’m a little agnostic personally about which ones, we could talk more about this, but I do think some reforms to the system are really key to get at the structures there as well.” Further on this, Berkowitz gives counterexamples of where he claims parliamentary democracies have led to “populism”, including the UK and Australia; you can’t just say “well here are a few examples of where parliamentary democracy has worked very well; it clearly has to do with their structure.” (In the case of Japan, I’d immediately suspect there are massive confounding variables, including having one of the most homogeneous populations in the world as well as having been highly economically successful)
(3) I haven’t fully read/analyzed this section of Berkowitz’ talk, but I think that once again this is some shallow/hasty dismissal: “turnout wasn’t high in Trump 1.0, so Trump can’t be responsible for higher turnout in Trump 2.0” is not a knock-down argument in itself. It’s wholly possible that Trump was so polarizing after 4 additional years of hogging the limelight that he had an upward effect on turnout. However, I do agree it’s probably not the most persuasive argument—but I don’t think that you ought to be so confident in your own analysis, either. Having not done serious research on the matter, it still seems more likely that the expansion of mail-in/absentee voting also had a sizable upward effect. In the end, all three of our explanations could be right. Perhaps Berkowitz should have mentioned your point, perhaps it wasn’t that crucial.
In summary, I’d say it’s easy to pick apart any political pundit’s analysis; I imagine when I listen to this podcast I’ll have a number of criticisms. However, I think it’s also important to apply similar scrutiny to our own criticisms.
That’s good pushback, thank you.
I’ll need to edit the piece more deeply, but for now I’ve added an explanation at the top.
Here are some counter criticisms
That is a great summary of the modern critique of the MVT, thanks for sharing. The problem is that it applies to policy outcomes, but the subject is candidate selection. Caplan’s criticism is that voters are irrational at connecting votes to policies and policies to outcomes, which is true. If voters have a simpler utility function like “I want to vote against any anti-Trump candidates”, the median voter will apply very well. If 51% of voters choose to vote against any anti-trump candidates and you are anti-trump, the MVT will still cook your goose. Compare with democratic primaries, where the Bernie faction mobilized 40%, but Bernie does not have 4/5s of Trumps influence at all.
The response concerns me because Berkowitz passes up a great opportunity to explain a fundamental dynamic of the system in question. Imagine asking an economist “why did the price of gasoline increase when supply contracted” and the economist didn’t mention supply and demand curves. Sure it could be a Giffen good with a weird speculative market, but your explanation should start with the theory that explains maximum variation, then move to edge cases.
Saying there is no silver bullet is a strong positive claim that Berkowitz doesn’t back up. I’m not all claiming there is definitive evidence that a silver bullet exists. I am simply claiming that we have not seen evidence disproving silver bullets, which Berkowitz claims. I should have made that more clear.
Viz-a-viz populism, if we define populism as “did any populist party form” then yes, there are few patterns. Martin Gurri is probably right that populism emerges from the information environment. But if we define it as populists that cam close to ruling, by getting 20% of the vote share, then we have some patterns. The German Bundestag was stunningly successful at deescalating every issue that the populists could use after 2016, for example (they paid billions to keep refugees out of Europe). Keeping populists out of office can probably be done with electoral engineering, but keeping populist minorities from forming can’t, so depends on goal post definitions.
Fair enough, I shouldn’t argue that policy feedback is the definitive reason and Trump not. I’m just concerned that Berkowitz doesn’t mention other explanations. Generally I am suspicious that activists will overfit on data to make their issue seem really important.
Thanks for the responses. To go through the points you mention:
I’m just not that convinced that the MVT is akin to the gas price situation you described, in that I don’t see it as that explanatory/fundamental/crucial to mention (in combination with the following remarks). Importantly, as part of this I’ll say that it seems like you’re watering down the MVT to increasingly become “politicians try to appeal to the majority of people,” which is arguably far more intuitive and thus less necessary to cover in name/detail. As I understood it, the MVT is more meant to explain why politicians converge to more-moderate policy preferences in order to win over the “median” voter. So if you’re just going to say (e.g.) that “candidates were less inclined to be anti-Trump because a majority of people wanted to vote against the anti-trump candidates,” you don’t need to mention the phrase “Median voter theorem” any more than you actually have to mention “supply and demand ** curves/graphs ** “ (as opposed to just “supply and demand”).
I’m still not convinced there is a silver bullet, and my base rate for “situations where there is actually a silver bullet despite the dismissal by people who are more experienced than me, yet it’s just not getting used” is really low. Thus, I’m inclined to side with Berkowitz on this—including his observation that there are definitely multiple helpful reforms that could be taken.
If the situation is as you described it, I definitely think that’s a fair concern—and it’s something that I’ve seen too many pundits do.
The median voter theorem is just a mathematical conclusion from a set of simple assumptions, it can’t be watered up or down. If some set of voters rank proposals on a single axis with single-peaked preferences then the only Condorcet winner will be the median voters ideal point. The key here is that the voters choose the axis on which to rank the proposals. The voters can rank the candidates on any axis, taxes or policies or height. Usually smarter actors rank proposals and candidates on an ideology axis by collapsing issues onto one axis, as a mental heuristic. But if they interpret the axis as “does he run ads where he shoots guns” instead of “does he vote for my tax rate”, the gun ads determine the axis not the tax rate. In this case the assumption is that Republican primary voters care a lot about the Trump-support axis.
The two level game papers are cool, but not relevant here.
The MVT is important here because Trumps influence over represenatives is non-linear with his vote share. If Trump loses 20% of his primary influence and loses the median primary voter, he does not lose 20% of his influence, he loses most of his influence.
There are better ways to select leaders, but our current leaders choose not to influence them. Our current leaders like the current leader-selection system because they win at it. (See paper)[https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1467-9248.2005.00514.x?casa_token=R0YSBl-4UKQAAAAA:pwa_9ENFHN8VU9PT50ymM6R1fy57NtdDSW1R7K5aeT8tGXMRvLzwHzkAoFh7di80Lp4mv8b4e8ZnFWg]
1, The “watering down” comment was really referring to the idea of expanding the “preference axis” assumption to include more than just policy, to the extent that MVT changes from “Politicians moderate their policies towards the center of policy axes” (which would be a perhaps unintuitive claim that doesn’t need explicit reference to “MVT”) to “Politicians appeal to the majority of the voting public” (which is almost “no-duh” except that it irons over potential wrinkles, like “someone who is very far right/left won’t even bother voting unless one of the candidates moves far enough towards them, rather than spending their time to go out and vote for the ‘less bad candidate’ in an election which they might deep down recognize they won’t actually have any impact on...”). Ultimately, I think the question of whether Berkowitz should have discussed MVT by name is less important that the question of MVT’s validity, but I’m not in an epistemic position to get deeper into the weeds on that. 😶 2. I still don’t see that as a true “silver bullet”; I imagine Berkowitz might consider it one of the potential positive reforms, though.
Original median voter theorem paper, Duncan Black in 1948
Anyway, this is really a pedagogic question. How best should we teach politics? Some people advocate that we should disregard the MVT because it is both “obvious” and “false”. Setting that contradiction aside, I think the underlying assumption that only theories with perfect data fit should be taught is wrong. By the same logic, physics should not teach Newtownian mechanics because it is wrong relative to quantum mechanics. You can’t just give the reader quantum mechanics, you need to start with a theory they can understand then update it.