Voter Motivation and the Quality of Democratic Choice

Jean-Robert Tyran and Lydia Mechtenberg

No 11622, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers

Abstract: The quality of democratic choice critically depends on voter motivation, i.e. on voters’ willingness to cast an informed vote. If voters are motivated, voting may result in smart choices because of information aggregation but if voters remain ignorant, delegating decision making to an expert may yield better outcomes. We experimentally study a common interest situation in which we vary voters’ information cost and the competence of the expert. We find that voters are more motivated to collect information than predicted by standard theory and that voter motivation is higher when subjects demand to make choices by voting than when voting is imposed on subjects.

Keywords: Voting; Experiment; Information acquisition; Information aggregation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 D71 D72 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-exp, nep-hpe, nep-pol and nep-soc
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP11622 (application/pdf)
CEPR Discussion Papers are free to download for our researchers, subscribers and members. If you fall into one of these categories but have trouble downloading our papers, please contact us at subscribers@cepr.org

Related works:
Journal Article: Voter motivation and the quality of democratic choice (2019)
Working Paper: Voter Motivation and the Quality of Democratic Choice (2016)
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:cpr:ceprdp:11622

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP11622

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers Centre for Economic Policy Research, 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().