Competitive Campaigns and the Responsiveness of Collective Choice

Abstract

We analyze a model of direct legislation to identify conditions under which competition in the provision of campaign information can affect the responsiveness of electoral outcomes to the preferences that a voter (or set of voters) would express if she (they) knew everything there was to know about the consequences associated with her electoral alternatives. The basic intuition underlying the model is that a voter's ability use campaign information to form accurate inferences about the consequences of competing electoral alternatives can be affected by information provider attributes. We show that competition in the provision of campaign information increases the responsiveness of electoral outcomes only if competition produces these attributes.