Is Cheaper Democracy Better? The Odd-Electorate Paradox

We study how new information technologies affect democratic decision-making in a Condorcet model with costly information acquisition. Voters endogenously choose whether to become informed. Technological change alters both information costs and signal precision, with nontrivial effects on equilibrium participation and collective accuracy. Lower information costs can reduce information acquisition and collective accuracy only when the electorate is odd, a phenomenon we call the odd-electorate paradox. Under uniqueness of equilibrium, however, lower costs increase participation and improve collective accuracy when initial information acquisition is sufficiently low. Improvements in signal quality need not increase equilibrium information acquisition and may even reduce collective accuracy through equilibrium responses. In large electorates, the fraction of informed voters converges to zero, while the number of informed voters converges to a Poisson distribution. Democratic accuracy may therefore rest on sparse expertise and socially aggregated information.