IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/bon/boncrc/crctr224_2020_209.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Voter Attention and Distributive Politics

Author

Listed:
  • Carl Heese

Abstract

This paper studies theoretically how endogenous attention to politics affects social welfare and its distribution. When information of citizens about uncertain policy consequences is exogenous, a median voter theorem holds. When information is endogenous, attention shifts election outcomes into a direction that is welfare-improving. For a large class of settings, election outcomes maximize a weighted welfare rule. The implicit decision weight of voters with higher utilities is higher, but less so, when information is more cheap. In general, decision weights are proportional to how informed voters are. The results imply that uninformed voters have effectively almost no voting power, that the ability to access and interpret information is a critical determinant of democratic participation, and that elections are susceptible to third-party manipulation of voter information.

Suggested Citation

  • Carl Heese, 2020. "Voter Attention and Distributive Politics," CRC TR 224 Discussion Paper Series crctr224_2020_209, University of Bonn and University of Mannheim, Germany.
    • Handle: RePEc:bon:boncrc:crctr224_2020_209
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.crctr224.de/research/discussion-papers/archive/dp209
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Voting; Information Aggregation; Attention; Costly Information Acquisition; Welfare;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D72 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Political Processes: Rent-seeking, Lobbying, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    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:bon:boncrc:crctr224_2020_209. 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: CRC Office (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.crctr224.de .

    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.