TITLE:
Education and Electoral Outcomes
AUTHORS:
Diganta Mukherjee, Rajlakshmi Mallik
KEYWORDS:
Election; Education; Party Image; Candidate Efficiency; Macro vs Local Concerns
JOURNAL NAME:
Theoretical Economics Letters,
Vol.2 No.2,
May
23,
2012
ABSTRACT: This paper develops a model of the electoral process for analyzing the voters’ choice faced with two parties. A typical voter is concerned with both local governance issues and macro issues. The relative importance attached by a voter to local and macro concerns is governed by the level of education of the voter. The voter must exercise his choice based on two sets of information—the first pertains to the candidate’s efficiency level and the other pertains to the efficiency of the party as a whole. The model focuses on the case where the party with the better image has been forced to put up a less efficient candidate, as this is sufficient to analyse the trade-off involved. The model shows how the election out-comes may be influenced by the education level of the electorate and the design of election campaigns. This has implications for the design of education policy in the long run and measuring social efficiency of education.