Information Acquisition, Strategic Voting, and Improving the Quality of Democratic Choice

I develop a theory of strategic voting that captures an endogenous link between the costly decision to vote and the costly decision to become politically informed. I then use the theoretical model to study the effects of different public policy instruments on the incentives of voters to cast informed votes. I show that policies that directly target the cost of political engagement, by influencing either the cost of information acquisition or the cost associated with casting a vote, have an ambiguous effect on the overall level of informed voting, and thus have unclear welfare implications. I also show that compulsory voting provides an incentive for voters to acquire political information so as to ensure that the vote they are compelled to cast actually benefits them, which overall, increases the level of informed voting.