Economic voting and information

The notion that voters are rational causes three closely related paradoxes: the paradox of voting, the paradox of indeterminacy and the paradox of ignorance. In this paper, we discuss the paradox of ignorance, i.e., the claim that the rational voter is uninformed about economic and political issues. We argue that the paradox of ignorance exaggerates the degree of voter ignorance. We maintain that voters, on average, are ignorant about the economy because of the consumption cost of information. Nevertheless, some voters do have an incentive to become informed, either because vote-relevant information is collected as a by-product of other activities or because information has value in social interaction. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.