Electoral Competition with Rationally Inattentive Voters

This paper studies how voters’ selective ignorance interacts with policy design by political candidates. It shows that the selectivity empowers voters with extreme preferences and small groups, that divisive issues attract most attention, and that public goods are underfunded. Finer granularity of information increases these inefficiencies. Rational inattention can also explain why competing opportunistic candidates do not always converge on the same policy issues.

• Publication year

  2020

• Venue

  Journal of the European Economic Association

• Publication date

  2020-09-23

• Fields of study

  Economics, Political Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.2139/SSRN.2685212
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

• The Politics of Attention

  2018cited by this paper
• #Republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media

  2017cited by this paper
• Greater Internet use is not associated with faster growth in political polarization among US demographic groups

  2017cited by this paper
• Electoral Control with Behavioral Voters

  2017cited by this paper
• Rational Ignorance, Elections, and Reform

  2016cited by this paper
• Attention Discrimination: Theory and Field Experiments with Monitoring Information Acquisition

  2016cited by this paper
• Media Competition and the Source of Disagreement

  2016cited by this paper
• Media and Politics

  2015cited by this paper
• Rational Inattention to Discrete Choices: A New Foundation for the Multinomial Logit Model

  2015cited by this paper
• Revealed Preference, Rational Inattention, and Costly Information Acquisition

  2015cited by this paper
• Elections and Divisiveness: Theory and Evidence

  2015cited by this paper
• Does Polarisation of Opinions Lead to Polarisation of Platforms? The Case of Correlation Neglect

  2015cited by this paper
• Overconfidence in Political Behavior

  2015cited by this paper
• Specialized Learning and Political Polarization

  2014cited by this paper
• Voting to Tell Others

  2014cited by this paper
• Mecro-Economic Voting: Local Information and Micro-Perceptions of the Macro-Economy

  2014cited by this paper
• The Persuadable Voter

  2014cited by this paper
• Competition for Attention∗

  2013cited by this paper
• Poverty Impedes Cognitive Function

  2013cited by this paper
• Do Conditional Cash Transfers Affect Electoral Behavior? Evidence from a Randomized Experiment in Mexico

  2013cited by this paper
• Does Inattention to Political Debate Explain the Polarization Gap between the U.S. Congress and Public

  2013cited by this paper
• Salience and Consumer Choice

  2013cited by this paper
• Conditional Cash Transfers, Political Participation, and Voting Behavior

  2012cited by this paper
• The Hated Property Tax: Salience, Tax Rates, and Tax Revolts

  2012cited by this paper
• The Effect of Newspaper Entry and Exit on Electoral Politics

  2011cited by this paper
• Media and Political Persuasion: Evidence from Russia

  2011cited by this paper
• Policy and Choice: Public Finance through the Lens of Behavioral Economics

  2011cited by this paper
• Economic Policy Reforms 2012. Going for Growth

  2011cited by this paper
• The Persuadable Voter: Wedge Issues in Presidential Campaigns

  2010cited by this paper
• Persuasion: Empirical Evidence

  2010cited by this paper
• Who Do You Blame in Local Finance? An Analysis of Municipal Financing in Italy

  2010cited by this paper
• Government Transfers and Political Support

  2009influential reference
• Optimal Sticky Prices Under Rational Inattention

  2009cited by this paper
• London School of

  2009cited by this paper
• EZ-Tax: Tax Salience and Tax Rates

  2009cited by this paper
• Post-broadcast democracy: How media choice increases inequality in political involvement and polarizes elections

  2009cited by this paper
• Information Immobility and the Home Bias Puzzle

  2009cited by this paper
• Transparency and Economic Policy

  2009cited by this paper
• Information-Constrained State-Dependent Pricing

  2008cited by this paper
• Rational Voters and Political Advertising

  2008cited by this paper
• Limited Attention and Income Distribution

  2008cited by this paper
• Heterogeneous information and trade policy

  2008influential reference
• Salience and Taxation: Theory and Evidence

  2008cited by this paper
• The Persuadable Voter: Wedge Issues in Presidential Campaigns

  2008cited by this paper
• Candidate Valence and Ideological Positioning in U.S. House Elections

  2007cited by this paper
• The Political Economy of Structural Reform: Empirical Evidence from OECD Countries

  2006cited by this paper
• Would rational voters acquire costly information?

  2006cited by this paper
• Television and Voter Turnout

  2006cited by this paper
• Principled Agents?: The Political Economy of Good Government

  2006cited by this paper
• A Theory of Participation in Elections

  2006cited by this paper
• Costly Information Acquisition: Experimental Analysis of a Boundedly Rational Model

  2006cited by this paper
• Fairness and redistribution

  2005cited by this paper
• THE EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS OF FISCAL ILLUSION

  2005cited by this paper
• Committee Design with Endogenous Information

  2004cited by this paper
• A Group Rule–Utilitarian Approach to Voter Turnout: Theory and Evidence

  2004cited by this paper
• Blind Retrospection. Electoral Responses to Drought, Flu, and Shark Attacks

  2004cited by this paper
• Implications of rational inattention

  2003cited by this paper
• Fairness and Redistribution: U.S. Versus Europe

  2003cited by this paper
• Stage Financing and the Role of Convertible Securities

  2003cited by this paper
• An Informational Rationale for Political Parties

  2002cited by this paper
• A Model of Candidate Location When One Candidate Has a Valence Advantage

  2001cited by this paper
• Mass media and public policy

  2001cited by this paper
• Candidate Positioning in U.S. House Elections

  2001cited by this paper
• D-Nominate after 10 Years: A Comparative Update ToCongress: A Political Economic History of Roll Call Voting

  2001cited by this paper
• Political Economics: Explaining Economic Policy (Zeuthen Lectures)

  2000influential reference
• The Democratic Dilemma: Can Citizens Learn What They Need to Know?

  1998cited by this paper
• Congress: A Political-Economic History of Roll Call Voting

  1997cited by this paper
• Uninformed Votes: Information E ects in Presidential Elections

  1996cited by this paper
• What Americans Know about Politics and Why It Matters

  1996influential reference
• The Empirical Analysis Of Fiscal Illusion

  1996cited by this paper
• Quantal Response Equilibria for Normal Form Games

  1995cited by this paper
• The Rational Public: Fifty Years of Trends in Americans' Policy Preferences

  1992cited by this paper
• Balanced-budget redistribution as the outcome of political competition

  1987cited by this paper
• The Relationship Between Information, Ideology, and Voting Behavior

  1987cited by this paper
• The Politics of Ambiguity

  1987cited by this paper
• The pure theory of large two-candidate elections

  1984cited by this paper
• Electoral Margins, Constituency Influence, and Policy Moderation: a Critical Assessment

  1973cited by this paper
• An Economic Theory of Democracy

  1957cited by this paper
• Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy

  1943cited by this paper
• Poverty Impedes Cognitive Function

  year unknowncited by this paper
• Considerations on Representative Government

  year unknowncited by this paper

• Inattentive Citizens: Impact of elections on political interest across 93 countries

  2026cites this paper
• Ancestral origins of attention to environmental issues

  2025cites this paper
• Fact-Finding in Social Networks

  2025cites this paper
• The Political Economy of Attention: Media Salience, Voter Cognition, and Electoral Accountability

  2025cites this paper
• Do Polarized Issues Carry More Weight in Voter Decision-Making? Insights From the 2022 Congressional Midterm Elections

  2025cites this paper
• Persuasion and Information Aggregation in Elections

  2025cites this paper
• The best at the top? Candidate ranking strategies under closed list proportional representation

  2024cites this paper
• Legal Responsibility of the Implementation of Presidential Campaign Promises in Indonesia

  2024cites this paper
• The political business cycle of tax reforms

  2024cites this paper
• Endogenous Benchmarking and Government Accountability: Experimental Evidence from the COVID-19 Pandemic

  2023cites this paper
• Paying for inattention

  2023cites this paper
• Voter Learning, Unidimensional Ideology, and Polarization

  2023cites this paper
• Do Bigger Legislatures Lead to Bigger Government? Evidence from a Brazilian Municipal Council Reform

  2023cites this paper
• Abstention and informedness in nonpartisan elections

  2023cites this paper
• (Dis)honesty and the value of transparency for campaign promises

  2023cites this paper
• Red Herrings: A Theory of Bad Politicians Hijacking Media Attention

  2023cites this paper
• Voter attention and electoral accountability

  2023cites this paper
• Experimental Tests of Rational Inattention

  2023cites this paper
• Voter polarization and extremism*

  2022cites this paper
• Posterior Separable Cost of Information

  2022cites this paper
• Career Incentives and Corruption: A Lab Experiment

  2022cites this paper
• Wisdom of the crowd? Information aggregation in representative democracy

  2022cites this paper
• Media Competition and Social Disagreement

  2022cites this paper
• The zero-rent society: Evidence from hydropower and petroleum windfalls in Norwegian local governments

  2022cites this paper
• Cooperating Through Leaders ⋆

  2022cites this paper
• It’s Simple. Why stability is Bad for Voters? ∗

  2022cites this paper
• Rationally Inattentive Behaviour with A Priori Knowledge

  2022cites this paper
• Modelling the Objective Function of Managers in the Presence of Overlapping Shareholding

  2022cites this paper
• Political Agency and Implementation Subsidies with Imperfect Monitoring

  2021cites this paper
• Rational inattention and politics: how parties use fiscal policies to manipulate voters

  2021influential citation
• How Campaign Ads Stimulate Political Interest

  2021cites this paper
• Intergovernmental communication under decentralization

  2021cites this paper
• Rational Inattention: A Review

  2021cites this paper
• Tax Transparency and Social Welfare: The Role of Government Commitment

  2021cites this paper
• The Effects of Social Capital on Government Performance and Turnover: Theory and Evidence from Italian Municipalities

  2020cites this paper
• Browsing versus Studying: A Pro-market Case for Regulation

  2020cites this paper
• Negative Voters? Electoral Competition with Loss-Aversion

  2020cites this paper
• When the light shines too much: Rational inattention and pandering

  2020cites this paper
• EXTREMIST PLATFORMS: POLITICAL CONSEQUENCES OF PROFIT‐SEEKING MEDIA

  2020cites this paper
• Abstention and Costly Information Acquisition in Elections

  2020cites this paper
• What Bird is That? Central Banking and Monetary Policy in the Last Forty Years

  2020cites this paper
• Public opinion as nowcast: consistency and the role of news uncertainty

  2020cites this paper
• Electoral Accountability and Selection with Personalized News Aggregation

  2020cites this paper
• Voter Attention and Distributive Politics

  2020cites this paper
• Multidimensional Information and Rational Inattention*

  2020influential citation
• Stereotypes and Politics

  2020cites this paper
• Measuring Voters' Knowledge of Political News

  2020cites this paper
• Electoral accountability and selection with personalized information aggregation

  2020cites this paper
• Issue Salience and Political Stereotypes

  2020cites this paper
• de Travail n ° 2019-16 Inattention and the Taxation Bias

  2019cites this paper
• Information and targeted spending J on

  2019cites this paper
• Ignorance isn't bliss: Uninformed voters drive budget cycles

  2019cites this paper
• Identification and inference in discrete choice models with imperfect information

  2019influential citation
• Political rents and voter information in search equilibrium

  2019cites this paper
• Paying for Inattention

  2019cites this paper
• The Politics of Personalized News Aggregation

  2019cites this paper
• The Politics of News Personalization

  2019influential citation
• Electoral Competition with Fake News

  2019cites this paper
• Information and targeted spending

  2019influential citation
• Electoral Accountability and Responsive Democracy

  2019cites this paper
• Inattention and the Taxation Bias∗

  2019cites this paper
• Identification in discrete choice models with imperfect information

  2019cites this paper
• Selective and Mutlidimensional Learning

  2018cites this paper
• Who Punishes Extremist Nominees? Candidate Ideology and Turning Out the Base in US Elections

  2018cites this paper
• The Politics of Attention

  2018cites this paper
• Rational Inattention : A Disciplined Behavioral Model

  2018influential citation
• Concurrent Elections and Political Accountability: Evidence from Italian Local Elections

  2018cites this paper
• When the light shines too much . Rational inattention , populism and pandering

  2018cites this paper
• Ignorance Isn’t Bliss: Uninformed Voters Drive Budget Cycles CAMA Working Paper 2/2018 January 2018

  2018influential citation
• Ideology as Opinion: A Spatial Model of Common-Value Elections

  2017cites this paper
• Sentiment, Electoral Uncertainty and Stock Returns*

  2017cites this paper
• Portfolio Diversification, Market Power, and the Theory of the Firm

  2017cites this paper
• Confirmation Bias and Electoral Accountability

  2017cites this paper
• Wisdom of the Crowd? Information Aggregation and Electoral Incentives

  2017cites this paper
• A Model of Focusing in Political Choice

  2017cites this paper
• Polarization and Pandering in Common-value Elections

  2016cites this paper
• Social Media and Political Donations: New Technology and Incumbency Advantage in the United States

  2016cites this paper
• Political Influence Through Microtargeting

  year unknowncites this paper
• The Political Economy of Attention and Electoral Accountability

  year unknowncites this paper
• T HE P OLITICAL E CONOMICS OF A TTENTION

  year unknowncites this paper
• RESCUE ON STAGE: BORDER ENFORCEMENT AND PUBLIC ATTENTION IN THE MEDITERRANEAN SEA

  year unknowninfluential citation