It suffices for us, if the moral and physical condition of our own citizens qualifies them to select the able and good for the direction of their government, with a recurrence of elections at such short periods as will enable them to displace an unfaithful servant, before the mischief he mediates may be irremediable.
Thomas JeffersonThe social meaning or function of parliamentary activity is no doubt to turn out legislation and, in part, administrative measures. But in order to understand how democratic politics serve this social end, we must start from the competitive struggle for power and office and realize that the social function is fulfilled, as it were, incidentally – in the same sense as production is incidental to the making of profits.
Joseph SchumpeterThe cycling problem has haunted the public choice literature since its inception. Cycling introduces a degree of indeterminacy and inconsistency into the political process that hampers the observer's ability to predict outcomes, and clouds the normative properties of the outcomes achieved. The median voter theorem offers a way out of this morass of indeterminateness, a way out that numerous empirically minded researchers have seized. But the median voter equilibrium remains an “artifact” of the assumption that issue spaces have a single dimension (Hinich, 1977). If candidates can compete along two or more dimensions, the equilibrium disappears and with it the predictive power of the econometric models that rely on this equilibrium concept.
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