Voting costs and voter welfare

Xiaopeng Xu ()
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Xiaopeng Xu: University of California-Berkeley

Economics Bulletin, 2002, vol. 3, issue 21, 1-6

Abstract: This note considers the effect of the cost of voting on voters' welfare and their incentive to reduce voting costs in a simple model in which two single-voter teams participate to win an election from two alternatives. When each voter''s benefit of winning is his private information but uncertain to his rival, reductions in the cost of voting have two opposing effects on each voter''s welfare, namely, the direct effect and the indirect effect. And the voters may be worse off as their voting costs decrease. In this case, voters will face a prisoner''s dilemma, as each voter has a unilateral incentive to reduce his cost of voting.

JEL-codes: C7 D8 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2002-09-27
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