 Rent-seeking aspects of political advertisingA chapter in 40 Years of Research on Rent Seeking 2, 1986, pp 297-311 from Springer Abstract: Abstract Political contests have all the usual characteristics of rent-seeking games characterized in the recent volume edited by Buchanan, Tollison and Tullock (1980). That is to say, resources are committed to a distributive contest where the social pie is not necessarily enlarged but rather divided up (a policy enacted) via a ‘winner take all’ apportioning. Since political advertising is one method of influencing electoral outcomes, we might expect competitive political advertising to exhibit rent-seeking losses of the usual sort. The extent of the rent-seeking losses associated with political advertising depends upon the extent to which advertising affects voter perceptions of the relative merits of electoral alternatives. Political proponents may well completely dissipate any electoral rents at stake through their advertising efforts, yet still increase social welfare if political advertisments provide sufficiently valuable information to the electorate. On the other hand, if advertising has no effect on voter perceptions or provides information of dubious value then rent dissipating advertising may generate substantial rent-seeking losses. Date: 1986 There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it. Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-3-540-79247-5_16 Ordering information: This item can be ordered from DOI: 10.1007/978-3-540-79247-5_16 Access Statistics for this chapter More chapters in Springer Books from Springer |
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