Comparer des méthodes

	Median Voter Model	Spatial Voting Model
Domaine	Political Economy	Political Science
Famille	MCDM	MCDM
Année d'origine	1948	1957
Auteur d'origine	Duncan Black & Anthony Downs	Harold Hotelling, Duncan Black & Anthony Downs
Type	Formal model of electoral competition	Formal model of electoral and legislative choice
Source fondatrice	Black, D. (1948). On the Rationale of Group Decision-making. Journal of Political Economy, 56(1), 23-34.	Downs, A. (1957). An Economic Theory of Democracy. Harper & Row. ISBN: 9780060417505
Alias	Median Voter Theorem, Black's Median Voter Theorem, Downsian Median Voter Model, Median Voter Equilibrium	Spatial Theory of Voting, Downsian Model, Proximity Voting Model, Median Voter Model
Apparentées	4	4
Résumé	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.	The spatial voting model represents voters and political alternatives as points in a common geometric policy space and assumes that each voter supports the alternative nearest to their own ideal point. Rooted in Hotelling's location theory, Duncan Black's 1948 single-peakedness result, and Anthony Downs's 1957 economic theory of democracy, the model yields two foundational results: the median voter theorem, which identifies the equilibrium policy in one dimension, and the Downsian prediction that two vote-seeking parties converge toward the center. It is the workhorse formalism behind modern empirical estimation of political positions.