Exam 20: Political Economy and Public Choice

When benefits are concentrated and costs are diffused, resources often get wasted on projects with high benefits and low costs.

Why do some voters choose to be rationally ignorant?

When a policy is specialized in its impact, difficult to understand, and affects a small part of the country, it is more likely that:

Public choice is a field of study that:

The median voter theorem holds that the:

If voters care about two issues such as taxes and war, then politicians:

A good incentive system aligns self-interest with the social interest.

Democracies usually have lots of economic freedom, but economic freedom is a poor predictor of a country's standard of living.

In the case of the sugar quota, those harmed are rationally ______ and those benefitted are rationally ______.

Special interest groups are rationally:

In 2010, an unemployed United States Army veteran named Alvin Greene won the Democratic primary for the South Carolina Senate race. At the time of his victory, Greene had raised no money, had done no visible campaigning, had no Web site, and had not attended the state party's convention. There is no evidence of fraud. Two explanations for his victory involve his name: (1) Greene is a popular last name among African Americans, which encouraged African-American voters to support him at the ballot; and (2) Greene's name appeared above his opponent's name, Vic Rawl, which encouraged voters uninformed about either candidate to vote for Greene. How does Greene's victory illustrate rational ignorance?

In general, there is a high positive correlation between per capita income and economic freedom across countries.

Rational ignorance in politics is the idea that obtaining information about candidates has little benefit because one's own vote has almost no chance of changing the outcome of an election.

Government ownership of the media:

How are elections correlated to economic business cycles in the United States?

Political contributions suggest that PACs are rationally:

Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen argued that famine in the history of the world could have been eliminated by:

Evidence suggests that voters are myopic, meaning they are responsive to economic conditions:

Which of the following is an example of rational ignorance?

Which three variables have been shown to have strong predictive power for election results?