History
In his 1929 paper entitled “Stability in Competition,” Harold Hotelling notes in passing that political candidates’ platforms seem to converge during majoritarian elections. Hotelling compared political elections to businesses in the private sector. He postulated that just as there is not a striking difference between salesmen's products, so, too, there is not a stark contrast between politicians' platforms. This is because politicians, just like salesmen with consumers, seek to capture the majority of voters. Duncan Black, in his 1948 paper titled “On the Rationale of Group Decision-making” provided a form analysis of majority voting that made the theorem and its assumptions explicit. Black wrote that he saw a large gap in economic theory concerning how voting determines the outcome of decisions, including political decisions. Black’s paper thus began the long line of research that was to follow on how economics can explain voting systems. In 1957, with his paper titled “An Economic Theory of Political Action in Democracy,” Anthony Downs expounded upon the median voter theorem.
Read more about this topic: Median Voter Theorem
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“Philosophy of science without history of science is empty; history of science without philosophy of science is blind.”
—Imre Lakatos (1922–1974)
“Let it suffice that in the light of these two facts, namely, that the mind is One, and that nature is its correlative, history is to be read and written.”
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“When the history of this period is written, [William Jennings] Bryan will stand out as one of the most remarkable men of his generation and one of the biggest political men of our country.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)