IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/pra/mprapa/53482.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The Voters' Curses: The Upsides and Downsides of Political Engagement

Author

Listed:
  • Prato, Carlo
  • Wolton, Stephane

Abstract

Scholars have long deplored voters' lack of interest in politics and argue greater political engagement would improve the performance of democracy. We consider a model of elections where successful communication of political messages during campaigns requires efforts by politicians and a representative voter. The voter's incentive to pay attention to politics affects the effectiveness of the electoral process as screening and disciplining device. The performance of the electoral process and the voter's level of political activity are low when the voter cares little about politics--this is the curse of the apathetic voter--, or cares a lot about politics--this is the curse of the engaged voter. Consequently, an engaged voter is not always an active voter and fostering political engagement (e.g., by lowering the cost of political information or facilitating policy changes) might have negative consequences on voter's attention to politics and welfare.

Suggested Citation

  • Prato, Carlo & Wolton, Stephane, 2014. "The Voters' Curses: The Upsides and Downsides of Political Engagement," MPRA Paper 53482, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    • Handle: RePEc:pra:mprapa:53482
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/53482/1/MPRA_paper_53482.pdf
    File Function: original version
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/65046/1/MPRA_paper_65046.pdf
    File Function: revised version
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Andrea Prat, 2005. "The Wrong Kind of Transparency," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 95(3), pages 862-877, June.
    2. Gershkov, Alex & Szentes, Balázs, 2009. "Optimal voting schemes with costly information acquisition," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 144(1), pages 36-68, January.
    3. Enriqueta Aragonès & Micael Castanheira & Marco Giani, 2015. "Electoral Competition through Issue Selection," American Journal of Political Science, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 59(1), pages 71-90, January.
    4. Healy, Andrew & Malhotra, Neil, 2009. "Myopic Voters and Natural Disaster Policy," American Political Science Review, Cambridge University Press, vol. 103(3), pages 387-406, August.
    5. Gilat Levy, 2007. "Decision Making in Committees: Transparency, Reputation, and Voting Rules," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 97(1), pages 150-168, March.
    6. Lupia,Arthur & McCubbins,Mathew D., 1998. "The Democratic Dilemma," Cambridge Books, Cambridge University Press, number 9780521584487, November.
    7. Wittman, Donald, 2007. "Candidate quality, pressure group endorsements and the nature of political advertising," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 23(2), pages 360-378, June.
    8. Andrew Leigh, 2009. "Does the World Economy Swing National Elections?," Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, Department of Economics, University of Oxford, vol. 71(2), pages 163-181, April.
    9. Andrea Prat, 2002. "Campaign Advertising and Voter Welfare," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 69(4), pages 999-1017.
    10. Hall, Richard L. & Deardorff, Alan V., 2006. "Lobbying as Legislative Subsidy," American Political Science Review, Cambridge University Press, vol. 100(1), pages 69-84, February.
    11. Feddersen, Timothy & Sandroni, Alvaro, 2006. "Ethical Voters and Costly Information Acquisition," Quarterly Journal of Political Science, now publishers, vol. 1(3), pages 287-311, July.
    12. Hortala-Vallve, Rafael & Larcinese, Valentino, 2017. "The Perverse Consequences of Policy Restrictions in the Presence of Asymmetric Information," Political Science Research and Methods, Cambridge University Press, vol. 5(3), pages 411-425, July.
    13. Soroka, Stuart & Andrew, Blake & Aalberg, Toril & Iyengar, Shanto & Curran, James & Coen, Sharon & Hayashi, Kaori & Jones, Paul & Mazzoleni, Gianpetro & Woong Rhee, June & Rowe, David & Tiffen, Rod, 2013. "Auntie Knows Best? Public Broadcasters and Current Affairs Knowledge," British Journal of Political Science, Cambridge University Press, vol. 43(4), pages 719-739, October.
    14. Gene M. Grossman & Elhanan Helpman, 1996. "Electoral Competition and Special Interest Politics," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 63(2), pages 265-286.
    15. Steven Callander, 2011. "Searching and Learning by Trial and Error," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 101(6), pages 2277-2308, October.
    16. Stephen Coate, 2004. "Political Competition with Campaign Contributions and Informative Advertising," Journal of the European Economic Association, MIT Press, vol. 2(5), pages 772-804, September.
    17. Mathias Dewatripont & Jean Tirole, 2005. "Modes of Communication," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 113(6), pages 1217-1238, December.
    18. Callander, Steven, 2011. "Searching for Good Policies," American Political Science Review, Cambridge University Press, vol. 105(4), pages 643-662, November.
    19. Ashworth, Scott, 2006. "Campaign Finance and Voter Welfare with Entrenched Incumbents," American Political Science Review, Cambridge University Press, vol. 100(1), pages 55-68, February.
    20. Stephen Coate, 2004. "Pareto-Improving Campaign Finance Policy," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 94(3), pages 628-655, June.
    21. Page, Benjamin I. & Brody, Richard A., 1972. "Policy Voting and the Electoral Process: The Vietnam War Issue," American Political Science Review, Cambridge University Press, vol. 66(3), pages 979-995, September.
    22. Hao Li, 2001. "A Theory of Conservatism," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 109(3), pages 617-636, June.
    23. Drazen, Allan & Grilli, Vittorio, 1993. "The Benefit of Crises for Economic Reforms," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 83(3), pages 598-607, June.
    24. Lupia,Arthur & McCubbins,Mathew D., 1998. "The Democratic Dilemma," Cambridge Books, Cambridge University Press, number 9780521585934, November.
    25. Sourav Bhattacharya, 2016. "Campaign rhetoric and the hide-and-seek game," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 47(3), pages 697-727, October.
    26. Carmines, Edward G. & Stimson, James A., 1980. "The Two Faces of Issue Voting," American Political Science Review, Cambridge University Press, vol. 74(1), pages 78-91, March.
    27. repec:cep:stieop:48 is not listed on IDEAS
    28. Oliveros, Santiago, 2013. "Abstention, ideology and information acquisition," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 148(3), pages 871-902.
    29. Justin Fox, 2007. "Government transparency and policymaking," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 131(1), pages 23-44, April.
    30. Sourav Bhattacharya, 2006. "Campaign Rhetoric and the Hide-and-Seek Game," Working Paper 326, Department of Economics, University of Pittsburgh, revised Jun 2007.
    31. Haggard, Stephan & Webb, Steven B, 1993. "What Do We Know about the Political Economy of Economic Policy Reform?," The World Bank Research Observer, World Bank, vol. 8(2), pages 143-168, July.
    32. Fox, Justin & Van Weelden, Richard, 2012. "Costly transparency," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 96(1), pages 142-150.
    33. Paul Freedman & Michael Franz & Kenneth Goldstein, 2004. "Campaign Advertising and Democratic Citizenship," American Journal of Political Science, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 48(4), pages 723-741, October.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Prato, Carlo & Wolton, Stephane, 2013. "Rational Ignorance, Elections, and Reform," MPRA Paper 68638, University Library of Munich, Germany, revised 10 Dec 2015.
    2. Prato, Carlo & Wolton, Stephane, 2018. "Rational ignorance, populism, and reform," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 55(C), pages 119-135.
    3. Satoshi Kasamatsu & Daiki Kishishita, 2022. "Informative campaigning in multidimensional politics: The role of naïve voters," Journal of Theoretical Politics, , vol. 34(1), pages 78-106, January.
    4. Prato, Carlo & Wolton, Stephane, 2014. "Electoral Imbalances and their Consequences," MPRA Paper 68650, University Library of Munich, Germany, revised 26 Nov 2015.
    5. Cotton, Christopher, 2012. "Pay-to-play politics: Informational lobbying and contribution limits when money buys access," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 96(3), pages 369-386.
    6. Chen, Ying & Eraslan, Hulya, 2018. "Learning While Setting Precedents," Working Papers 18-001, Rice University, Department of Economics.
    7. Raphael Boleslavsky & Christopher Cotton, 2015. "Information and Extremism in Elections," American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, American Economic Association, vol. 7(1), pages 165-207, February.
    8. Wittman, Donald, 2007. "Candidate quality, pressure group endorsements and the nature of political advertising," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 23(2), pages 360-378, June.
    9. Donald Wittman, 2009. "How Pressure Groups Activate Voters and Move Candidates Closer to the Median," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 119(540), pages 1324-1343, October.
    10. Hans Gersbach, 2014. "Campaigns, political mobility, and communication," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 161(1), pages 31-49, October.
    11. Vanberg, Christoph, 2008. ""One Man, One Dollar"? Campaign contribution limits, equal influence, and political communication," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 92(3-4), pages 514-531, April.
    12. Bruno Carvalho, 2021. "Campaign Spending in Local Elections: the Effects of Public Funding," Working Papers ECARES 2021-30, ULB -- Universite Libre de Bruxelles.
    13. Thanh Le & Erkan Yalcin, 2023. "Endogenous expropriation and political competition," Economics and Politics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 35(1), pages 313-332, March.
    14. Bekkouche, Yasmine & Cagé, Julia & Dewitte, Edgard, 2022. "The heterogeneous price of a vote: Evidence from multiparty systems, 1993–2017," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 206(C).
    15. Laurent Bouton & Micael Castanheira & Allan Drazen, 2024. "A Theory of Small Campaign Contributions," The Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 134(662), pages 2351-2390.
    16. Hahn, Volker, 2017. "Committee design with endogenous participation," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 102(C), pages 388-408.
    17. Thomas Bassetti & Filippo Pavesi, 2017. "Electoral Contributions And The Cost Of Unpopularity," Economic Inquiry, Western Economic Association International, vol. 55(4), pages 1771-1791, October.
    18. Guha, Brishti, 2022. "Ambiguity aversion, group size, and deliberation: Costly information and decision accuracy," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 201(C), pages 115-133.
    19. Köppl-Turyna, Monika, 2014. "Campaign finance regulations and policy convergence: The role of interest groups and valence," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 33(C), pages 1-19.
    20. Bekkouche, Yasmine & Cagé, Julia & Dewitte, Edgard, 2022. "The heterogeneous price of a vote: Evidence from multiparty systems, 1993–2017," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 206(C).

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Political Apathy; Political Engagement; Elections; Campaigns; Policy Change; Institutional Design; Political Information;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D72 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Political Processes: Rent-seeking, Lobbying, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior
    • D78 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Positive Analysis of Policy Formulation and Implementation
    • D83 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Search; Learning; Information and Knowledge; Communication; Belief; Unawareness

    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:pra:mprapa:53482. 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.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with 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: Joachim Winter (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/vfmunde.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.