This paper introduces specialized elections. A specialized election randomly assigns each voter to one election, freeing her of voting responsibilities in other elections. By reducing voters' responsibilities, specialized elections encourage more information acquisition. Specialized elections also make campaigning less costly. A shortcoming of specialized elections is the increase in outcome variance resulting from the sampling effect. Whether or not specialized elections improve democratic outcomes hinges upon the tradeoff between more informed voters and greater outcome variance. Sufficient conditions are derived for the increase in information to generate an outcome nearer to that which would be chosen by a fully informed electorate.
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Paper provided by Northwestern University, Center for Mathematical Studies in Economics and Management Science in its series Discussion Papers with number
1006.
Length: Date of creation: Sep 1992 Date of revision: Handle: RePEc:nwu:cmsems:1006
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