Voter Turnout and Political Rents: Theory and Evidence

Does lower turnout induce weaker discipline of politicians? We build a model to address this question and test the model’s predictions on cross-section data from 49 democracies. Theoretically, we find that if political information is costly for ideologically mobile voters, higher in-formation cost decreases turnout and makes electoral competition less intense. This allows politicians to appropriate higher rents in equilib-rium. Empirically, we find that higher education level of citizens and higher non-voting costs induce higher turnout, which, in turn, leads to lower corruption. The quantitative effect is large: one standard deviation increase in turnout reduces corruption by about 1 3 of standard deviation