Probabilistic Voting and the Importance of Centrist Ideologies in Democratic Elections

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Abstract
This study indicates that a probabilistic voting model allowing voters to abstain from alienation or indifference leads to a transitive ordering over candidate ideologies. Further, a weighted form of the mean most preferred ideology of the voters is the optimal ideology for both candidates in a two-candidate election. Centrist ideologies are attractive to the major parties in a two-party system, and probabilistic voting provides an important part of the explanation.