Political rents and voter information in search equilibrium

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Andersen, Jorgen Juel; Heggedal, Tom-Reiel
• 署名单位: BI Norwegian Business School
• 刊物名称: GAMES AND ECONOMIC BEHAVIOR
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0899-8256
• DOI: 10.1016/j.geb.2019.01.006
• 发表日期: 2019
• 页码: 146-168
• 关键词: Information search; political equilibrium; Political rents; voter turnout

摘要

Political parties committed to grab rents may run for election, and even win, if citizens are uninformed. But, how is the political equilibrium affected if citizens can mitigate this information problem through costly information search? We propose a political equilibrium theory with endogenous information search and turnout. We show that: (i) the political equilibrium generates political uncertainty characterized by a distribution of rent policies; (ii) the expectation of this rent distribution is inversely U-shaped in the information search cost; (iii) turnout is lower and rents are higher the more proportional is the electoral system. (C) 2019 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.