Elections, Private Information, and State-Dependent Candidate Quality

Thomas Jensen ()

No 07-13, Discussion Papers from University of Copenhagen. Department of Economics

Abstract: In this paper we contribute to the study of how democracy works when politicians are better informed than the electorate about conditions relevant for policy choice. We do so by setting up and analyzing a game theoretic model of electoral competition. An important feature of the model is that candidate quality is state-dependent. Our main insight is that if the electorate is sufficiently well informed then there exists an equilibrium where the candidates' policy positions reveal their information and the policy outcome is the same as it would be if voters were fully informed (the median policy in the true state of the world).

Keywords: electoral competition; uncertainty; private information; candidate quality; revealing equilibria (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 D82 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 15 pages
Date: 2007-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.econ.ku.dk/english/research/publications/wp/2007/0713.pdf/ (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:kud:kuiedp:0713

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Papers from University of Copenhagen. Department of Economics Oester Farimagsgade 5, Building 26, DK-1353 Copenhagen K., Denmark. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Thomas Hoffmann ().