A Model of Political Agency with Emotional Voters

Colin Jennings (University of Strathclyde)

Abstract: This paper attempts to extend existing models of political agency to an environment in which voting may be non-instrumental. It constructs a model where politicians may be good or populist. They differ because populists are more willing to pander to voters who may choose inferior policies in a large-group electoral setting where their vote is insignificant compared with those that voters would choose were their vote decisive in determining the electoral outcome. This links directly to the literature on rational ignorance following Downs (1957) and expressive voting following Brennan and Lomasky (1993). The paper investigates the incentives for good politicians to pool with or separate from populists and focuses on two key issues – (1) how far voter’s preferences are from those held by the better informed good politician and (2) the cost involved in persuading voters to change their views. This model provides a basis for which we can consider issues such as media influence and inter-jurisdictional comparisons. In political agency models (see Besley (2006)), bad politicians feature prominently. This paper finishes by considering how the inclusion of bad politicians may affect the behaviour of good politicians and concludes with the suggestion that a small amount of potential corruption may be socially useful if voters are risk-averse