IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/wly/amposc/v60y2016i3p726-737.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The Voters' Curses: Why We Need Goldilocks Voters

Author

Listed:
  • Carlo Prato
  • Stephane Wolton

Abstract

Scholars have long deplored voters' lack of interest in politics and argued in favor of greater political engagement. We present a formal theory of elections where successful communication of campaign messages requires both effort by candidates and attention from voters. Voters' interest in politics affects their attention and impacts the effectiveness of the electoral process as a screening and disciplining device. In line with existing theories, there exists a curse of the uninterested voter: When voters have little interest in politics, the electoral process performs poorly, and voters' attention to politics is low. Surprisingly, we uncover a curse of the interested voter, by which the same happens when voters have a strong interest in politics. Our results highlight the importance of distinguishing between voters' interest and attention, two notions often conflated in empirical studies. Moreover, policy interventions aimed at subsidizing the cost of acquiring political information can have unintended consequences.

Suggested Citation

  • Carlo Prato & Stephane Wolton, 2016. "The Voters' Curses: Why We Need Goldilocks Voters," American Journal of Political Science, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 60(3), pages 726-737, July.
    • Handle: RePEc:wly:amposc:v:60:y:2016:i:3:p:726-737
    DOI: 10.1111/ajps.12223
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://doi.org/10.1111/ajps.12223
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1111/ajps.12223?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Li Hu & Anqi Li, 2018. "The Politics of Attention," Papers 1810.11449, arXiv.org, revised Jan 2019.
    2. Prato, Carlo & Wolton, Stephane, 2018. "Rational ignorance, populism, and reform," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 55(C), pages 119-135.
    3. Nunnari, Salvatore & Zapal, Jan, 2017. "A Model of Focusing in Political Choice," CEPR Discussion Papers 12407, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    4. Thanh Le & Erkan Yalcin, 2023. "Endogenous expropriation and political competition," Economics and Politics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 35(1), pages 313-332, March.
    5. Guido Merzoni & Federico Trombetta, 2021. "A Note on Asymmetric Policies: Pandering and State-specific Costs of Mismatch in Political Agency," DISEIS - Quaderni del Dipartimento di Economia internazionale, delle istituzioni e dello sviluppo dis2102, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Dipartimento di Economia internazionale, delle istituzioni e dello sviluppo (DISEIS).
    6. Bräuninger, Thomas & Marinov, Nikolay, 2022. "Political elites and the “War on Truth’’," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 206(C).
    7. Eguia, Jon & Hu, Tai-Wei, 2022. "Voter Polarization and Extremism," Working Papers 2022-5, Michigan State University, Department of Economics.
    8. Merzoni, Guido & Trombetta, Federico, 2022. "Pandering and state-specific costs of mismatch in political agency," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 135(C), pages 132-143.
    9. Tinghua Yu & Elliott Ash, 2021. "Polarization and Political Selection," BCAM Working Papers 2105, Birkbeck Centre for Applied Macroeconomics.
    10. Sonin, Konstantin & Eilat, Ran & Agranov, Marina, 2020. "A Political Model of Trust," CEPR Discussion Papers 14672, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    11. Zerbini, Antoine, 2023. "The Case for Lobbying Transparency," SocArXiv w6vam, Center for Open Science.
    12. Anqi Li & Lin Hu, 2020. "Electoral Accountability and Selection with Personalized Information Aggregation," Papers 2009.03761, arXiv.org, revised Apr 2023.
    13. Gento Kato, 2020. "When strategic uninformed abstention improves democratic accountability," Journal of Theoretical Politics, , vol. 32(3), pages 366-388, July.
    14. Devdariani, Saba & Hirsch, Alexander V., 2023. "Voter attention and electoral accountability," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 224(C).

    More about this item

    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:wly:amposc:v:60:y:2016:i:3:p:726-737. 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: Wiley Content Delivery (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://doi.org/10.1111/(ISSN)1540-5907 .

    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.