Voter Information and Distributive Politics

Benjamin Blumenthal

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, 2026, vol. 18, issue 2, 293-312

Abstract: Does more information benefit voters? I examine this question in a novel setting of distributive politics and electoral accountability. Homogeneously informed electorates can benefit from less information through improvements in the control or screening of politicians. For heterogeneously informed electorates, I show that the distribution of resources and voter welfare is affected by the nature of informational heterogeneity and by voters' ability to communicate with each other, making less-informed voters better off than their more-informed counterparts in some cases.

JEL-codes: D72 D82 D83 H50 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.aeaweb.org/doi/10.1257/mic.20240340 (application/pdf)
https://www.aeaweb.org/articles/materials/24970 (application/zip)
Access to full text is restricted to AEA members and institutional subscribers.

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:aea:aejmic:v:18:y:2026:i:2:p:293-312

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.aeaweb.org/journals/subscriptions

DOI: 10.1257/mic.20240340

Access Statistics for this article

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics is currently edited by Johannes Hörner

More articles in American Economic Journal: Microeconomics from American Economic Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Michael P. Albert ().