Voter Attention and Distributive Politics

Carl Heese ()

CRC TR 224 Discussion Paper Series from University of Bonn and University of Mannheim, Germany

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.

Keywords: Voting; Information Aggregation; Attention; Costly Information Acquisition; Welfare (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 58
Date: 2020-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm and nep-mic
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bon:boncrc:crctr224_2020_209

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