Political rents and voter information in search equilibrium

Jørgen Andersen and Tom-Reiel Heggedal

Games and Economic Behavior, 2019, vol. 114, issue C, 146-168

Abstract: Political parties committed to grab rents may run for election, and even win, if citizens are uninformed. But, how is the political equilibrium affected if citizens can mitigate this information problem through costly information search? We propose a political equilibrium theory with endogenous information search and turnout. We show that: (i) the political equilibrium generates political uncertainty characterized by a distribution of rent policies; (ii) the expectation of this rent distribution is inversely U-shaped in the information search cost; (iii) turnout is lower and rents are higher the more proportional is the electoral system.

Keywords: Information search; Political equilibrium; Political rents; Voter turnout (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 D83 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0899825619300077
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:gamebe:v:114:y:2019:i:c:p:146-168

DOI: 10.1016/j.geb.2019.01.006

Access Statistics for this article

Games and Economic Behavior is currently edited by E. Kalai

More articles in Games and Economic Behavior from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().