On ignorant voters and busy politicians

R. Emre Aytimur () and Christian Bruns

No 252, University of Göttingen Working Papers in Economics from University of Goettingen, Department of Economics

Abstract: We show that a large electorate of ignorant voters can succeed in establishing high levels of electoral accountability. In our model an incumbent politician is confronted with a large number of voters who receive very noisy signals about her performance. We find that the accountability problem can be solved well in the sense that the incumbent exerts effort as if she faced a social planner who receives a perfect signal about her performance. Our results thus shed light on another potential blessing of large electorates in addition to information aggregation as postulated by the jury theorem.

Keywords: accountability; elections; information; jury theorem (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 D82 H41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
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: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:cegedp:252

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