A Policy-Focused Examination of the Political Center

Steven M. Karceski, Colby College

Previous studies on the political center in the United States focus on the ideological or partisan orientation of politicians or citizens: legislative voting records representing bipartisanship or citizens who tend to take middle ground positions are said to represent the center. In this paper, I propose an alternative way of thinking about the political center that focuses on policies instead of the behavior of actors. I present three ways of thinking about centrist policies: the median position, bipartisan agreement, and quantitative ideological scores created from self-reported ideology, partisanship, voting behavior, and an approach using singular value decomposition. Each way is discussed in detail and compared to the dominant characterization of the political center as right-leaning or socially liberal and economically or fiscally conservative. In general, I find the center defined in these ways is often left-of-center in the conventional way of thinking about partisanship and ideology. This has implications for contemporary American politics, namely it outlines a policy agenda that, according to the median voter model, that would be advantageous for politicians to pursue. Doing so not only holds the potential of increasing electoral success, but also to tighten the link between public preferences and policy in the United States.

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 Presented in Session 134. Theorizing Axes of Conflict in US Politics