CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 3,300Electoral Systems and Political ParticipationGame Theory and Voting SystemsPolitical Theory and Democracy

An economic theory of political action in a democracy

Downs, Anthony·1957·Journal of Political Economy
DOI 10.1086/257897
Open this paper in CoChat — free account

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1086/257897

Cites

Statistics

Recomputing p-values needs the paper’s full text.

Claims the paper makes

We couldn’t retrieve this paper’s full text, so its claims and self-check weren’t run. The registry and citation checks still apply.

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

  • Most people tend to remain ignorant and do not pursue information, but they react rationally once they receive information about the workings of government.

    “Therefore, most people tend to remain ignorant and do not pursue information, but they react rationally once they receive information about the workings of government”

    From Transparency and Trust in Government. Evidence from a Survey Experiment (2021) · cites this paper as Downs, 1957

  • The conscious choice of an individual to ignore a certain piece of information is based on a cost-benefit calculation, especially those where the informative effort (costs) are considered disproportionate to the perceived potential benefits.

    “As such, the conscious choice of an individual to ignore a certain piece of information is again based on a cost-benefit calculation, especially those where the informative effort (costs) are considered disproportionate to the perceived potential benefits (Rational Ignorance Theory; Downs, 1957).”

    From The privacy paradox – investigating discrepancies between expressed privacy concerns and actual online behavior – a systematic literature review (2017) · cites this paper as Downs, 1957

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Related

Authors
Downs, A.
Affiliations
Budapest University of Technology and Economics (HU)
Corresponding author
Downs, Anthony
ORCID
Downs, Anthony
Venue
Journal of Political Economy
Publisher
University of Chicago Press
Published
1957-04
Volume
65
Issue
2
Pages
135-150
ISSN
  • 0022-3808 (ISSN-L)
  • 1537-534X
DOI
10.1086/257897
OpenAlex
W2081553388
Cited by
3,300
References
0
Citations by year
2026: 158 · 2025: 179 · 2024: 281 · 2023: 235 · 2022: 193 · 2021: 223 · 2020: 281 · 2019: 296 · 2018: 208 · 2017: 159 · 2016: 147 · 2015: 100 · 2014: 94 · 2013: 113 · 2012: 114
FWCI
18.46
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed
Locations
Journal of Political Economy (publishedVersion)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Political Science and International Relations › Electoral Systems and Political Participation
  • Social Sciences › Economics, Econometrics and Finance › Economics and Econometrics › Game Theory and Voting Systems
  • Social Sciences › Political Science and International Relations › Political Theory and Democracy
Keywords
political action, democracy, economic theory of politics, political participation, voting behavior

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review