Testing the Median Voter Model and Moving Beyond its Limits: Do Characteristics of Politicians Matter?

We exploit a natural measure of congruence between politicians and their constituency' bnm bnnb fgvhjuis preferences to directly quantify the extent of legislative shirking and evaluate the mechanism of the median voter model. The median voter model explains the behavior of politicians with respect to revealed preferences of their constituency about 18.8 percentage points better than a random decision benchmark. However, it fails to account for a substantial part of its theoretical prediction of convergence. Nevertheless, competition for voters under majority rule crowds out individual charact eristics and party affiliations as potential factors which explain legislative shirking.