The effects of voting costs on the democratic process and public finances

Roland Hodler, Simon Luechinger and Alois Stutzer

Working papers from Faculty of Business and Economics - University of Basel

Abstract: Increasing the attractiveness of voting is often seen as a remedy for unequal participation and the influence of special-interest groups on public policy. However, lower voting costs may also bring less informed citizens to the poll inviting efforts to sway these voters. We substantiate this argument in a probabilistic voting model with campaign contributions. In an empirical analysis for the 26 Swiss states, we find that lower voting costs due to postal voting are related to higher turnout, lower average education of participants, lower knowledge on the political issues they were deciding on as well as lower government welfare expenditures.

Keywords: Fiscal policies; political knowledge; postal voting; special-interest politics; voter turnout; voting costs (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 D78 H00 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-pbe, nep-pol and nep-pub
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://edoc.unibas.ch/28604/1/PostalVoting_27Jan12_01.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The Effects of Voting Costs on the Democratic Process and Public Finances (2015)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bsl:wpaper:2012/02

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working papers from Faculty of Business and Economics - University of Basel Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by WWZ ().