IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/econjl/v131y2021i635p1105-1134..html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Buying Informed Voters: New Effects of Information on Voters and Candidates

Author

Listed:
  • Cesi Cruz
  • Philip Keefer
  • Julien Labonne

Abstract

Despite the prominence of information in theories of electoral accountability, providing voters with information often fails to improve politician performance. Using two experiments in the Philippines, we show that when voters are unfamiliar with basic government capabilities, merely informing them of what politicians could do is sufficient to decrease support for incumbents. However, politicians can counteract this decrease in support by increasing clientelistic practices such as vote buying. Our work shows how even neutral information campaigns can improve the leverage of voters vis-à-vis their politicians, offering guidance for the design of interventions to change the electoral equilibrium in clientelistic countries.

Suggested Citation

  • Cesi Cruz & Philip Keefer & Julien Labonne, 2021. "Buying Informed Voters: New Effects of Information on Voters and Candidates," The Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 131(635), pages 1105-1134.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:econjl:v:131:y:2021:i:635:p:1105-1134.
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/ej/ueaa112
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Lockwood, Ben & Porcelli, Francesco & Redoano, Michela & Schiavone, Antonio, 2022. "Does Data Disclosure Improve Local Government Performance? Evidence from Italian Municipalities," The Warwick Economics Research Paper Series (TWERPS) 1434, University of Warwick, Department of Economics.
    2. James Habyarimana & Stuti Khemani & Thiago Scot, 2023. "The importance of political selection for bureaucratic effectiveness," Economica, London School of Economics and Political Science, vol. 90(359), pages 746-779, July.
    3. Firoz Ahmed & Roland Hodler & Asad Islam, 2024. "Partisan Effects of Information Campaigns in Competitive Authoritarian Elections: Evidence from Bangladesh," The Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 134(660), pages 1303-1330.
    4. Agneman, Gustav, 2022. "How economic expectations shape preferences for national independence: Evidence from Greenland," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 72(C).
    5. Schechter, Laura & Vasudevan, Srinivasan, 2023. "Persuading voters to punish corrupt vote-buying candidates: Experimental evidence from a large-scale radio campaign in India," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 160(C).
    6. Alice Guerra & Mogens K. Justesen, 2022. "Vote buying and redistribution," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 193(3), pages 315-344, December.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:econjl:v:131:y:2021:i:635:p:1105-1134.. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press or the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/resssea.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.