Electoral Accountability, Distributive Conflict, and Probabilistic Voting

Abstract

Models of electoral accountability typically assume a politician provides a public good. Yet in many contexts, elected officials distribute private goods among voters with conflicting interests. We present a formal model to analyze this situation. An elected official allocates a rivalrous good to a number of voters, who each observe their own allocation but neither others' allocations nor the official's action. Each voter’s challenge is to determine whether the incumbent stole from other voters when deciding to sack or retain the incumbent. This problem can be resolved if voters retain the incumbent probabilistically, so that the vote of any voter from whom the incumbent steals is effectively up-weighted. However, this benefit of probabilistic voting also comes with a cost, since the fact that the incumbent may be sacked by mistake diminishes the allocation they are willing to provide to voters.

Keywords: electoral accountability, distributive politics, moral hazard, probabilistic voting, Condorcet jury theorem

JEL Classification: C72, D70, D72