Wisdom of the Crowd? Information Aggregation and Electoral Incentives

Carlo Prato () and Stephane Wolton ()

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: Elections have long been understood as a mean to encourage candidates to act in voters' interest as well as a way to aggregate dispersed information. This paper juxtaposes these two key features within a unified framework. As in models of electoral control, candidates compete for office by strategically proposing policy platforms. As in models of information aggregation, agents are not always informed about the policy which maximizes the electorate welfare. Candidates face a trade-off between acting in the electorate's best interest and maximizing their chance of being elected. We provide conditions under which electoral institutions encourage candidates' conformism---thereby stifling proper competition among ideas---and render information aggregation unfeasible in equilibrium. In extensions, we highlight that the new political failure we uncover cannot be fully resolved by liberalizing access to candidacy or reducing voter information.

Keywords: Elections; Information Aggregation; Access to Candidacy; Restrictions to Candidacy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D70 D72 D82 D83 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017-11-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-mic and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/82753/1/MPRA_paper_82753.pdf original version (application/pdf)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/84405/1/MPRA_paper_84405.pdf revised version (application/pdf)

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:pra:mprapa:82753

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().