Do Voters Vote in Line with their Policy Preferences?—The Role of Information

Mattias Nordin

CESifo Economic Studies, 2014, vol. 60, issue 4, 681-721

Abstract: In this article, I investigate how political information affects voting behavior. Specifically, I test (i) if more informed voters are more likely to vote for their closest politicians; and (ii) if this translates into a bias on the aggregate level. To do so, I use a set of Swedish individual survey data on the preferences for local public services of both politicians and voters, which provides an opportunity to investigate how information affects voters’ ability to match their preferences with those of their politicians. The results indicate that more informed voters are more likely to vote for politicians with similar preferences for local public services and, on the aggregate level, that the left-wing parties would have received 1–3 percentage points fewer votes if all voters had been equally well-informed. (JEL codes: D72, D80, H71)

Date: 2014
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/cesifo/ifu012 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to 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:oup:cesifo:v:60:y:2014:i:4:p:681-721.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

CESifo Economic Studies is currently edited by Panu Poutvaara

More articles in CESifo Economic Studies from CESifo Group Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().