Electoral Competition, Control and Learning

Dewan, Torun; Hortalà-Vallvé, Rafael

doi:10.1017/s0007123416000764

Cited by 25 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 28 publications

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“…A similar result holds for the analysis of direct democracy (Prato and Strulovici 2016) or government–opposition interactions (Dewan and Hortala-Vallve 2016).…”

supporting

confidence: 67%

Citizens United: A Theoretical Evaluation

Prato¹,

Wolton²

2017

PSRM

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The 2010 US Supreme Court’s decision on Citizens United v. Federal Electoral Commission lifted restrictions on the funding by unions and corporations of groups engaging in independent political advertising (outside spending). Many have criticized the majority opinion’s premise that outside spending cannot corrupt or distort the electoral process. Fewer have examined the implications of this decision under the Court’s assumptions. Using a game-theoretic model of electoral competition, we show that informative outside spending by a group whose policy preferences are partially aligned with the electorate may reduce voter welfare. This negative effect is more likely when policy information is highly valuable for the electorate or congruence between the group and voters is high. We further show that the regulatory environment produced by the Court’s decision is always suboptimal: the electorate would be better off if either groups were allowed to coordinated with candidates or if outside spending was banned altogether.

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“…A similar result holds for the analysis of direct democracy (Prato and Strulovici 2016) or government–opposition interactions (Dewan and Hortala-Vallve 2016).…”

supporting

confidence: 67%

Citizens United: A Theoretical Evaluation

Prato¹,

Wolton²

2017

PSRM

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“…Another important strand of the literature studies the effect of informational asymmetries regarding a politician's competence and/or policy preference in a political agency setup, which typically results in pandering (e.g., Canes‐Wrone, Herron, and Shotts ), overly active politicians (Levy ), or overly cautious politicians (Ashworth and Bueno de Mesquita ). In a similar vein, Dewan and Hortala‐Vallve () show that electoral competition can induce too much risk‐taking.…”

mentioning

confidence: 89%

The Voters' Curses: Why We Need Goldilocks Voters

Prato

Wolton

2015

American J Political Sci

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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.

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“…While Prato and Wolton (2016a) are the first to adapt this modeling approach to electoral campaigns, their analysis of the relationship between voter interest in politics and attention to campaigns assumes perfect symmetry between candidates, and is thus completely silent about the role of electoral imbalances, as well as the resulting empirical implications. Other models of electoral campaigns are unidirectional: with either candidates informing voters (e.g., Prat, 2002;Coate, 2004;Ashworth, 2006;Dewan and Hortala-Vallve, 2016;Prato and Wolton, 2016b) or voters learning about candidates (e.g., Martinelli, 2006;Svolik, 2013;Hortala-Vallve and Larcinese, 2016).…”

Section: Formal Literature On Electoral Imbalancesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Electoral Imbalances and Their Consequences

Prato

Wolton

2018

The Journal of Politics

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It is widely believed that competitive elections are required for good democratic performance. Many races, however, see little electoral competition, due to asymmetries in voters' evaluation of candidates' quality (due, for example, to incumbency) and party labels (due, for example, to ideology). We study the consequences of both types of imbalances in a unified theoretical framework building on the notion that voters are rationally ignorant and need to pay costly attention to learn about candidates. Our paper rationalizes key empirical regularities such as the existence of large incumbency spending and electoral advantages or the heterogeneous effect of incumbency. Further, we highlight that properly accounting for voter attention is critical to interpreting empirical estimates of key determinants of electoral success, the sources of the incumbency advantage, and the causal effect of incumbency status. We also show that while depressing electoral competition, imbalances nonetheless improve voter welfare.

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Electoral Competition, Control and Learning

Cited by 25 publications

References 28 publications

Citizens United: A Theoretical Evaluation

Citizens United: A Theoretical Evaluation

The Voters' Curses: Why We Need Goldilocks Voters

Electoral Imbalances and Their Consequences

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