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Cited by 18,594

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An Economic Theory of Democracy.

Banfield, Edward C., Downs, Anthony·1958·Midwest Journal of Political Science

Abstract

Downs presents a rational calculus of voting that has inspired much of the later work on voting and turnout. Particularly significant was his conclusion that a rational voter should almost never bother to vote. This conclusion, especially as elaborated on by Riker and Ordeshook (1968) has shifted the attention of modern political scientists from explaining why people don't vote to explaining why they do.

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Metadata

Authors
Banfield, E. C., & Downs, A.
Venue
Midwest Journal of Political Science
Publisher
JSTOR
Published
1958-08
Volume
2
Issue
3
Pages
324
ISSN
0026-3397 (ISSN-L)
OpenAlex
W1977825494
Cited by
18,594
References
0
FWCI
124.08
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: An Economic Theory of Democracy. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.2307/2109186
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Banfield, E. C., & Downs, A. (1958). An Economic Theory of Democracy. Midwest Journal of Political Science. https://doi.org/10.2307/2109186

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Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.