Does the median voter theorem wipe out political participation?

The median voter theorem is one of the oldest and best known results in formal political theory. As is well known, it suggests that political parties will tend to adopt policy positions preferred by the voter who occupies the median position on the left-right ideological scale. The theorem requires a number of assumptions, but it implies that electoral politics will tend to be rather homogeneous and centrist.1 The idea that politics should be centrist and that parties should seek to capture the middle ground is widely used in popular discourse and it originates from the median voter theorem. It derives originally from Harold Hotelling’s (1929) analysis of competition in spatial markets, and was popularised and further developed in political science by Duncan Black (1948, 1958), but the best known statement of the theorem is in Anthony Downs (1957).