The Voters' Curses: Why We Need Goldilocks Voters

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.

Electoral Imbalances and Their Consequences

“…Our model can easily be extended to the voter observing whether candidates have incurred some (minimum) level of expenditures (the extensive margin) as long as she does not learn the total amount spent (the intensive margin) consistently with reporting requirement in the United States. 10 Finally, Prato and Wolton (2016a) show that the assumption of a representative voter plays no substantive role (despite the possibility of free-riding in a large electorate).…”

“…Following Dewatripont and Tirole (2005) and Hafer and Landa (2007), in our model, receivers' information is endogenous to their attention and to senders' communication effort. 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).…”

“…Unlike previous theories which focus almost exclusively on candidates' behavior, our work builds on the idea that the electorate is 'rationally ignorant' (Downs, 1957;Page and Shapiro, 1992). Voters must pay costly attention during campaigns to learn about candidates (as in Prato and Wolton, 2016a). We study how voters' strategic choice of attention and the resulting electoral outcomes are shaped by reputational imbalance-defined as the electorate's higher ex-ante evaluation of a candidate's quality-and partisan imbalance-defined as a higher ex-ante evaluation of a candidate's party label.…”

“…However, during the electoral campaign, the voter can learn candidates' types. As in Prato and Wolton (2016a), electoral communication requires attention by the voter and campaign expenditures by the candidate. In addition, we suppose that candidate 1 is more effective (all else equals) at reaching the voter (e.g., due to franking privileges).…”

Electoral Competition, Control and Learning

“…6 In our model, voters cannot commit to ignoring information from the opponent's campaign and this induces a higher-than-optimal level of reform by the incumbent. Over-reform due to competitive interaction in a campaign between politicians is also a feature in Prato and Wolton (2014). Relatedly, Bektimirov and Montagnes (2014) extend the classic model of electoral accountability (Barro (1973) and Ferejohn (1986)) to explore aspects of a specific set of reforms, namely privatisation.…”