Deliberative Responsiveness: the Philosophical Limits of the Median Voter Theory and the Value of Ranked Choice Voting in a Polarized United States

Median voter models capture something important about democratic politics but suffer from indeterminacy, imply that representatives should act unjustly when constituents prefer it, and embody an atomistic conception of democracy that neglects the fundamentally co-operative nature of collective self-rule. We can salvage their crucial insights by incorporating them into a hybrid conception of responsiveness that also draws on deliberative democratic theory: representatives should defer to median preferences but also engage in respectful public reasoning with citizens and their proxies when their decisions pertain to matters of basic justice or constitutional essentials. The change in perspective this implies can be illustrated by considering the current wave of ranked choice voting reforms in the United States, which can be understood as a way of encouraging representatives to talk to constituents in the right way, as well as tracking their preferences, and therefore of improving the deliberative responsiveness of the American representative system.