Credible Sources and Sophisticated Voters: When Does New Information Induce Economic Voting?

Alt, James E.; Marshall, John; Lassen, David Dreyer

doi:10.1086/683832

Cited by 73 publications

(41 citation statements)

References 54 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…5 This attention to voters' information environments follows recent work in political economy (e.g. Alt, Lassen, and Marshall 2016;Iversen and Soskice 2015; We study the UK case, and provide evidence of three important relationships. First, in observational data, attitudes towards the deficit vary systematically with the newspapers that people read, even when partisan identification and a range of other covariates are accounted for.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 83%

Making Austerity Popular: The Media and Mass Attitudes toward Fiscal Policy

Barnes

Hicks

2018

American J Political Sci

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

What explains variation in individual attitudes towards government deficits? Although macroeconomic stance is of paramount importance for contemporary governments, our understanding of its popular politics is limited. We argue that popular attitudes regarding austerity are influenced by media (and wider elite) framing. Information necessary to form preferences on the deficit is not provided neutrally, and its provision shapes how voters understand their interests. A wide range of evidence from Britain between 2010 and 2015 supports this claim. In the British Election Study, deficit attitudes vary systematically with the source of news consumption, even controlling for party identification. A structural topic model of two major newspapers' reporting shows that content varies systematically with respect to coverage of public borrowing-in ways that intuitively accord with the attitudes of their readerships. Finally, a survey experiment suggests causation from media to attitudes: deficit preferences change based on the presentation of deficit information.

show abstract

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 83%

Making Austerity Popular: The Media and Mass Attitudes toward Fiscal Policy

Barnes

Hicks

2018

American J Political Sci

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Unlike sophisticated voters [12], unsophisticated voters do not take the rational behaviour of the rest of society into account. Unsophisticated voters take decisions on the basis of a distorted perception of reality or do not link their perception to their voting decision, whereas sophisticated voters are empirically found to (typically) form correct expectations and vote rationally according to Alt, Lassen and Marshall [13]. Aidt (p. 359) [14], concludes that “voters may not be fully informed but they know enough to make rational and informed decisions”, whereas Aidt and Dutta (p. 354) [15] contend that “other groups (the poor and uneducated) … are … unlikely to cast rational … votes”.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Political cycles: Beyond rational expectations

Bohn

2018

PLoS ONE

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Motivation and methodExisting rational expectations models cannot satisfactorily explain why political budget manipulations systematically raise re-election chances and only occur in “specific contexts”. This paper offers a theoretical explanation by including unsophisticated voters into an opportunistic political cycle model; unsophisticated voters are unable to take the optimal behaviour of other agents (fully) into account, but may, nonetheless, vaguely suspect government deception.ResultsFirst, rationally expected manipulations are, on average, fruitless in equilibrium. By including unsophisticated voters we can, however, corroborate empirically found electoral effects of political budget manipulations. Second, unsophisticated voters become anxious and suspicious in an intransparent or uncertain world, but the government tries to “outperform” their scepticism by increasing budget manipulations in order to appear more competent and, ultimately, increase re-election chances. It is, therefore, not surprising that political budget cycles are observed in countries suffering from intransparencies such as developing countries or new democracies. Third and in addition, the model presented here predicts that political opportunism produces, unintentionally, a countercyclical policy effect in election years, thereby, for instance, alleviating the typical problem of policy procyclicality in developing countries.Additional contributionThe paper also offers a theoretical explanation for political distortions found in forecasts by US states. Based on overly optimistic revenue forecasts the incumbent state government can conduct expansionary fiscal policies in order to appear more competent prior to an upcoming election. Since the resulting deficit can only be observed afterwards, the government can effectively circumvent a constitutional balanced budget constraint. As a result, there are political forecast and budget cycles in the state. More generally, however, these findings may also apply to European countries where balanced budget constraints are or will be in place (for instance the debt brakes in Switzerland and Germany); similarly, they apply to the supra-national European Fiscal Compact of the European Union.

show abstract

“…Most studies so far explore this link within consolidated democracies such as the ones found with the degree and the direction of the endorser's bias. Alt et al (2016) find that economic information acquired from the Danish Central Bank causes voters to better update their belief when compared to information received from the government or political parties.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 90%

Compulsory voting and TV news consumption

Bruce

Lima

2019

Journal of Development Economics

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Do people acquire more information when they are encouraged to participate in elections? This paper presents empirical evidence on the effects of compulsory voting laws over the consumption of TV news. In Brazil, the law determines that literate citizens over the age of eighteen are subject to a number of penalties if they don't attend the ballots. This allows us to identify the causal effect of being under a compulsory voting regime on information acquisition. We find that compulsory voting has a significant and substantial positive impact on the probability of an individual to watch Brazil's main TV newscast. Additionally, the effect is stronger for poor voters and for individuals who have neutral evaluations of the incumbent president. Our results are restricted to young voters who just turned eighteen and are robust to different polynomials and bandwidth lengths.

show abstract

Credible Sources and Sophisticated Voters: When Does New Information Induce Economic Voting?

Cited by 73 publications

References 54 publications

Making Austerity Popular: The Media and Mass Attitudes toward Fiscal Policy

Making Austerity Popular: The Media and Mass Attitudes toward Fiscal Policy

Political cycles: Beyond rational expectations

Compulsory voting and TV news consumption

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About