Voter attention and distributive politics

Author(s)
Carl Heese
Abstract

This paper studies theoretically how endogenous attention to politics affects social welfare and its distribution. When information of citizens about
uncertain policy consequences is exogenous, a median voter theorem holds.
When information is endogenous, attention shifts election outcomes into a
direction that is welfare-improving. For a large class of settings, election outcomes maximize a weighted welfare rule. The implicit decision weight of voters
with higher utilities is higher, but less so, when information is more cheap.
In general, decision weights are proportional to how informed voters are. The
results imply that uninformed voters have effectively almost no voting power,
that the ability to access and interpret information is a critical determinant
of democratic participation, and that elections are susceptible to third-party
manipulation of voter information.

Organisation(s)
External organisation(s)
Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn
No. of pages
57
Publication date
09-2020
Austrian Fields of Science 2012
502045 Behavioural economics
Portal url
https://ucris.univie.ac.at/portal/en/publications/voter-attention-and-distributive-politics(1b928ebb-fb45-49cd-9055-61b3e57b9613).html