When strategic uninformed abstention improves democratic accountability

Abstract

<jats:p> The recent development in formal studies of elections produced two sets of findings that question the custom to treat voter information as a prerequisite for competent democratic decision-making. One argues that uninformed abstention is an effective strategy to approximate informed electoral outcome, and another suggests that uninformed voters may motivate strategic political elites to improve accountability. This article bridges and extends these two findings by analyzing strategic incentives in the comprehensive voting model with abstention and its connection with electoral accountability. The proposed model offers a contextual explanation for two contrasting logic in uninformed abstention, delegation and discouragement, and shows that uninformed voting with abstention sometimes improves accountability. Furthermore, uninformed abstention is more effective in generating democratically preferred outcome under delegatory than discouraged context. The results make a significant addition to the existing accountability literature by providing a more general mechanism by which less voter information improves policy outcomes. </jats:p>

Licencia para ejercer el derecho a votar y regulación de la información ofrecida por los medios

“…Por otro lado, Achen y Bartels (2017), han señalado que en varios estudios se ha asociado democracia disfuncional a sociedad mal informada (respecto a cuestiones políticas). En la misma línea, Kato (2020), ha señalado que frecuentemente en diferentes estudios empíricos, asumen explícita o implícitamente, que la información (respecto a cuestiones políticas) es el requisito previo para que los votantes tomen decisiones en una democracia competente. Sin embargo, como se ha señalado antes, es más que dudoso que en las democracias actuales los votantes dispongan de la información necesaria para emitir de forma competente su derecho a votar (De Vries & Solaz, 2018;Seligson & Booth, 2017).…”