Voters Can Have Strong Incentives to Become Informed, Or to Be Strategically Ignorant

The instrumental incentives of selfish voters to become politically informed seem to be diluted by low voter probabilities of being pivotal. This incentive dilution does not apply, however, to visible voter efforts made before candidates finalize their policy positions. Also, while free-riding can dilute incentives within large groups, this dilution can be overwhelmed by scale economies in group information production. Even with strong information incentives and zero information costs, however, voters can still prefer ignorance over full information. Optimal ignorance emphasizes negative over positive news, and induces candidates to take stable policy positions. Such voters can prefer to commit to declining mechanisms, such as voting lotteries, which increase incentives to become informed. These results are demonstrated for independent mixed-strategy equilibria of an integrated probabilistic-voting model of prospective elections over both distributive and general policies, where voters..