Compare methods

	Economic Voting Analysis	Median Voter Model
Field	Political Economy	Political Economy
Family	MCDM	MCDM
Year of origin	1971	1948
Originator	Gerald Kramer; Michael Lewis-Beck & Mary Stegmaier	Duncan Black & Anthony Downs
Type	Formal reward-punishment model of voting	Formal model of electoral competition
Seminal source	Kramer, G. H. (1971). Short-Term Fluctuations in U.S. Voting Behavior, 1896-1964. American Political Science Review, 65(1), 131-143.	Black, D. (1948). On the Rationale of Group Decision-making. Journal of Political Economy, 56(1), 23-34.
Aliases	Reward-Punishment Model, Retrospective Voting Model, Economic Vote Function, Responsibility Hypothesis	Median Voter Theorem, Black's Median Voter Theorem, Downsian Median Voter Model, Median Voter Equilibrium
Related	4	4
Summary	Economic voting analysis is the formal study of how voters reward or punish incumbents according to economic performance. In the reward-punishment (retrospective) model pioneered by Gerald Kramer in 1971, support for the governing party is a function of recent economic outcomes — growth, unemployment, and inflation — so that good times re-elect incumbents and bad times turn them out. Michael Lewis-Beck and Mary Stegmaier's 2000 review consolidated the field, establishing that economic voting is predominantly sociotropic (based on the national economy rather than personal finances) and that its strength depends on the clarity of responsibility: how easily voters can attribute outcomes to the incumbent.	The median voter model is a foundational result of political economy stating that, under majority rule with voters whose preferences are single-peaked on a single policy dimension, the ideal point of the median voter is the Condorcet winner — it cannot be beaten by any other alternative in pairwise majority voting. Duncan Black established the theorem formally in 1948, and Anthony Downs extended it in 1957 into a theory of party competition in which two vote-maximizing parties converge to the median voter's preferred policy. The model is the workhorse linking the distribution of citizen preferences to equilibrium policy outcomes in democracies.