Voter Information and Distributive Politics

Benjamin Blumenthal

No r7w4m, SocArXiv from Center for Open Science

Abstract: I consider a series of models of political agency with moral hazard and adverse selection, in which politicians allocate resources to voters. Within these models combining electoral accountability and distributive politics, I ask: is more information good for voters? With homogeneously informed electorates, I first show how and when less information can benefit voters, through the interaction of both partial control and partial screening effects. Building on this mechanism, I subsequently consider heterogeneously informed electorates and ask: how can voters’ welfare be affected by the informational advantage of a few voters? Is it better to be among the more informed few or the less informed many? I show that the ability of more informed voters to communicate with less informed voters and the nature of their informational advantage can play a significant role in affecting voters’ welfare by influencing politicians’ incentives to allocate resources to specific voters

Date: 2022-12-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-mic and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://osf.io/download/6393675b4cc86c011711562d/

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:osf:socarx:r7w4m

DOI: 10.31219/osf.io/r7w4m

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in SocArXiv from Center for Open Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by OSF ().