The effect of information on voting behavior

Mattias Nordin ()
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Mattias Nordin: Department of Economics, Postal: Department of Economics, Uppsala University, P.O. Box 513, SE-751 20 Uppsala, Sweden

No 2009:14, Working Paper Series from Uppsala University, Department of Economics

Abstract: This paper investigates how information affect voting behaviour. There exist a large literature suggesting that uninformed voters can use informational shortcuts or cues to vote as if they were informed. This paper tests this hypothesis using unique Swedish individual survey data on the preferences of both politicians and voters. I find that uninformed voters are significantly worse than informed voters at voting for their most preferred politicians. This suggests that uninformed voters can not make up for their lack of information using shortcuts. Furthermore, the errors uninformed voters make do not cancel out in large elections. Estimates suggest that the ruling majorities would have switched in almost 5% of Swedish municipalities had all voters been fully informed. The effects are estimated with both parametric and nonparametric estimation techniques.

Keywords: Voting behaviour; Citizen candidates; Information; Cues (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D70 D80 H71 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-pke and nep-pol
Date: 2009-09-18
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Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hhs:uunewp:2009_014

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