Davis-Hinich conditions and median outcomes in probabilistic voting models (Q799223)

This paper presents conditions under which the outcome of a vote corresponds to the outcome chosen by a median voter, when voting is probabilistic. The generalization retains from the Hinich-Davis conditions for the deterministic case the features of symmetry and ideal- point representability, but relaxes normality. The paper points out that these conditions are still quite restrictive, and that for many situations they will not hold - rendering median voter outcomes unlikely. Indeed, the results of Schofield show that in the deterministic case, median voter outcomes are generically untrue for issue spaces of a certain size. Whether this is also true in the probabilistic case, is not yet known.