Voter Turnout and Political Rents

Gani Aldashev

No 294, Carlo Alberto Notebooks from Collegio Carlo Alberto

Abstract: Is the decline in voter turnout an indicator of a worse health of a representative democracy? We build a simple probabilistic-voting model with endogenous turnout to address this question. We ?nd that a lower turnout caused by a higher cost of voting implies higher political rents. Contrarily, a lower turnout caused by a higher ideological mobility of voters or by a lower expressive bene?t of voting implies lower political rents. If voters have a civic-duty motive to vote which depends on the level of rents, multiple equilibria (a high-rents and a low-rents) can arise.

Keywords: voter turnout; political rents; electoral competition. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E62 H3 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 21 pages
Date: 2013
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-mac and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.carloalberto.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/no.294.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Voter Turnout and Political Rents (2015)
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:cca:wpaper:294

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Carlo Alberto Notebooks from Collegio Carlo Alberto Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Giovanni Bert ().