Are Voters Better Informed When They Have a Larger Say in Politics? Evidence for the European Union and Switzerland

Matthias Benz and Alois Stutzer

No 119, IEW - Working Papers from Institute for Empirical Research in Economics - University of Zurich

Abstract: Public choice theory takes citizens as rationally ignorant about political issues, because the costs of being informed greatly exceed the utility individuals derive from it. The costs of information (supply side) as well as the utility of information (demand side), however, can vary substantially depending on the political system under which citizens live. Using a large survey from Switzerland, we present empirical evidence that citizens are politically better informed when they have more extended participation rights in the political process. The results corroborate theoretical arguments and circumstantial evidence that voter information should be treated as endogenously determined by political institutions.

Keywords: voter competence; direct democracy; information costs; rational ignorance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D70 D80 H00 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-pbe and nep-pub
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (54)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.zora.uzh.ch/id/eprint/52019/1/iewwp119.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Are Voters Better Informed When They Have a Larger Say in Politics? -- Evidence for the European Union and Switzerland (2004)
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:zur:iewwpx:119

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IEW - Working Papers from Institute for Empirical Research in Economics - University of Zurich
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Severin Oswald ().