Voter Information and Distributive Politics

I consider a series of models of political agency with moral hazard and adverse selection, in which politicians allocate resources to voters. Within these models combining electoral accountability and distributive politics, I ask: is more information good for voters? With homogeneously informed electorates, I first show how and when less information can benefit voters, through the interaction of both partial control and partial screening effects. Building on this mechanism, I subsequently consider heterogeneously informed electorates and ask: how can voters’ welfare be affected by the informational advantage of a few voters? Is it better to be among the more informed few or the less informed many? I show that the ability of more informed voters to communicate with less informed voters and the nature of their informational advantage can play a significant role in affecting voters’ welfare by influencing politicians’ incentives to allocate resources to specific voters