IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/aop/jijoss/v13y2024i1p13-32.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The Democracy Tax - Politicians' Ignorance and Voters' Lack of Information in a Democratic Contest, a Case Study from the Czech Republic

Author

Listed:
  • Vilem Cap

    (Prague University of Economics and Business)

  • Marek Feurich

    (Prague University of Economics and Business)

  • Martin Lukavec

    (Prague University of Economics and Business)

Abstract

This paper highlights an important and neglected democracy limitation: voters make decisions based on incomplete information. This leads to inefficient or irrational decisions and applies to elections at all levels of the political system in the Western world. This paper shows that voting with incomplete information leads to the election of incompetent politicians. Testing of the Prague representatives has shown their lack of knowledge to perform their duties. The regression analysis performed does not show a statistically significant relationship between the representatives knowledge and their education or political experience. A possible solution is a sophisticated training system for elected candidates.

Suggested Citation

  • Vilem Cap & Marek Feurich & Martin Lukavec, 2024. "The Democracy Tax - Politicians' Ignorance and Voters' Lack of Information in a Democratic Contest, a Case Study from the Czech Republic," International Journal of Social Sciences, European Research Center, vol. 13(1), pages 13-32, December.
    • Handle: RePEc:aop:jijoss:v:13:y:2024:i:1:p:13-32
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://eurrec.org/ijoss-article-117094
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://eurrec.org/ijoss-article-117094?download=2
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    democracy; limits of democracy; competence of politicians; inefficiency of governance; rational choice; information asymmetry; education;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • H11 - Public Economics - - Structure and Scope of Government - - - Structure and Scope of Government
    • I21 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - Analysis of Education
    • K10 - Law and Economics - - Basic Areas of Law - - - General (Constitutional Law)

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:aop:jijoss:v:13:y:2024:i:1:p:13-32. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Jiri Rotschedl (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://ijoss.eurrec.org/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.