An Economic Theory of Political Action in a Democracy

1957/04/01 by Anthony Downs, Anthony J. Downs · 3,194 citations
Economics, Econometrics and Finance · Social Sciences · #Action (physics) #Democracy #Democratic theory #Economics #Electoral Systems and Political Participation #Fiscal Policy and Economic Growth #Law #Physics #Political action #Political economy #Political science #Politics

paper · doi:10.1086/257897

published in Journal of Political Economy 65(2), 135-150 (University of Chicago Press)

openalex publication_date 1957/04/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/04

Cited by

• Too Important to Ignore? Why Ambiguity and Broad Appeals Fail with Rising Issue Salience
• Beyond Proximity: Representational Isolation and Emotional Response in Climate Politics
• Does Enfranchisement Increase Descriptive Representation? The Case of Voting Age Reforms
• Do unhappy citizens vote for populism?
• Topical Negative Campaigning Under Spatial Pressure: Party-Level Strategies for Attacks Across Multiple Issues
• Win-Win Deescalation
• Why Are U.S. Parties So Polarized? A “Satisficing” Dynamical Model
• Do Parties Matter for Environmental Policy Stringency? Exploring the Program-to-Policy Link for Environmental Issues in 28 Countries 1990–2015
• Media Influence and Spatial Voting: The Role of Perceived Party Positions
• A formal model of party competition with salience
• Issue Diversification: Which Niche Parties Can Succeed Electorally by Broadening Their Agenda?
• Why Is the AfD so Successful in Eastern Germany? An Analysis of the Ideational Foundations of the AfD Vote in the 2017 Federal Election
• The Effects of Polarized Evaluations on Political Participation: Does Hating the Other Side Motivate Voters?
• A Question of Commitment: Investigating How Citizens Perceive Parties' Programmatic Responses to Competition
• Boomerang Effects in Science Communication
• Resilient Liquid Democracy: Mitigating Voting Power Imbalances via Secure Delegation Networks
• From context to congruence: Immigration salience and voter socialization
• Conceptualising sidestreaming: How the populist radical right appeals to atypical supporters
• Canada’s Increasing Class-Based Voting Disparities Amidst Declining Economic Policy Saliency
• Mainstream parties and climate policy development: what role for intra-party politics?
• When gender does not matter in the success of a female leader: the case of Giorgia Meloni and Fratelli d’Italia
• Socioeconomic (in)congruence in EU public policy: the role of civil society
• Polarization and the Global Crisis of Democracy: Common Patterns, Dynamics, and Pernicious Consequences for Democratic Polities
• Inequality and its strain on local Governments: Do external interventions Help?
• Electoral pressure, reputational risks, and coalition politics: how established parties respond to the rise of anti-immigrant parties
• Coordination and Incumbency Advantage in Multi-Party Systems—Evidence from French Elections
• How do elites view ideology? Analysing candidates’ associations of left and right
• Estimating the causal effects of cognitive effort and policy information on party cue influence
• Disasters and divisions: how partisanship shapes policymaker responses to natural disasters
• What Explains Country-Level Differences in Political Belief System Coherence?
• The Influence of Partisan Motivated Reasoning on Public Opinion
• The Bounded Confidence Model Of Opinion Dynamics
• Persuadable voters decided the 2022 midterm: Abortion rights and issues-based frameworks for studying election outcomes
• Network polarization: The study of political attitudes and social ties as dynamic multilevel networks
• Who's to blame? How performance evaluation and partisanship influence responsibility attribution in grand coalition governments
• The lure of rationality: Why does the deficit model persist in science communication?
• Information and Strategic Political Polarisation
• In-person or convenience voting? The role of the direct costs in explaining preferences for voting modalities
• Political Representation Gaps in Europe: Causes and Consequences
• Filter Bubbles, Echo Chambers, and Fake News: How Social Media Conditions Individuals to Be Less Critical of Political Misinformation
• On Condorcet's Jury Theorem with Abstention
• Microtargeting, voters’ unawareness, and democracy
• Risk-Averse Equilibrium for Games
• Finding the One: Ease of Candidate Choices in High Information Open‐List PR Systems
• Green matters? The effects of green party support, autonomy and capacity on subnational environmental infringements
• Women Experts and Gender Bias in Political Media
• Towards Strategic Persuasion with Language Models
• Decentralized health governance, private action, and welfare: evidence from India
• Happy citizens trust their rulers
• Unionist unity? Strategic voting at Scottish parliamentary elections
• Beyond the median voter: A model of how the ideological dimension shapes party polarization
• Breaking out of legacy mobilization networks: how the internet reaches and activates the politically disengaged
• Ideology, motivated reasoning, and cognitive reflection
• Mehrheitswahlen in Mehrpersonenwahlkreisen: Ein Schweizer Erfolgsrezept?
• Beyond the mean: how thinking about the distribution of public opinions reduces politicians’ perceptual errors
• Electoral Competition with Credible Promises and Strategic Voters
• An affinity based opinion dynamics model for the evolving pattern of political polarization
• THE EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS OF FISCAL ILLUSION
• Social Welfare in Battery Charging Games
• Collective contributions to polarization in political voting
• Political Connections and the Effectiveness of US State Government Resource Allocation
• k-Approval Veto: A Spectrum of Voting Rules Balancing Metric Distortion and Minority Protection
• Electoral Competition in Heterogeneous Districts
• Strategic dualism: CHP’s cleavage politics and the evolution of opposition coordination in Turkey
• When Do Citizens Support Corrupt Politicians? The Trade‐Offs Between Corruption and Competence
• How do different sources of policy analysis affect policy preferences? Experimental evidence from the United States
• How Issue Salience Explains the Rise of the Populist Right in Western Europe
• Surfing the Latin American Pink Tide: Secular Trends or Sudden Change in Public Opinion? An Oaxaca–Blinder Approach
• Expert Disagreement and the Duty to Vote
• Are newcomers financially responsible? Evidence from close elections in Brazilian Municipalities
• Exploring voter turnout dynamics in polarized elections: A group-rule utilitarian framework
• Ethno-Regional Parties Cannot Be Everything to Everyone: Electoral Risks of a More Diverse Issue Agenda
• Party Strategies in Local Elections: Insights from Israel
• The surveillance complex: deputized law and order in advanced democracies
• Nonconvergent Electoral Equilibria under Scoring Rules: Beyond Plurality
• Why Are Regulations Changed? A Parcel Analysis of Upzoning in Los Angeles
• Hotelling-Downs Model with Limited Attraction
• Wordkrill: Extending Wordfish into the multidimensional political space
• Reclaiming national sovereignty: the case of the conservatives and the far right in Austria
• The VP-function revisited: a survey of the literature on vote and popularity functions after over 40 years
• Political business cycles 40 years after Nordhaus
• Location, location, location: the Davis-Hinich model of electoral competition
• On the Distortion of Voting with Multiple Representative Candidates
• Of the People: Voting Is More Effective with Representative Candidates
• From Gerontocratic Rule to Political Adultism: The Experiential Bias in Germany’s Aging Electoral Democracy and the Limitations of a Vote 16 Policy
• On Voting and Facility Location
• Let me be perfectly unclear: strategic ambiguity in political communication
• Designing Effective and Acceptable Road Pricing Schemes: Evidence from the Geneva Congestion Charge
• The Unequal Distribution of Speaking Time in Parliamentary‐Party Groups
• Paradoxical class: paradox of interest and political conservatism in middle class
• How Much Does an e-Vote Cost? Cost Comparison per Vote in Multichannel Elections in Estonia
• The Shared Challenges of Institutional Theories: Rational Choice, Historical Institutionalism, and Sociological Institutionalism
• Chameleon voters and public choice
• Exit, Voice, and Mimicking Behavior: Evidence from Swiss Cantons
• A Note on Data Simulations for Voting by Evaluation
• Sorting between and within coalitions: the Italian case (2001–2008)
• Policy Gridlock versus Policy Shift in Gun Politics: A Comparative Veto Player Analysis of Gun Control Policies in the United States and Canada
• Media Bias in the Marketplace
• The privacy paradox – Investigating discrepancies between expressed privacy concerns and actual online behavior – A systematic literature review
• Unmasking the crowd: participants’ motivation factors, expectations, and profile in a crowdsourced law reform
• La nueva configuración del sistema de partidos valenciano. Una aproximación institucionalista
• Empirical Analysis and Agent-Based Modeling of the Lithuanian Parliamentary Elections
• Does violence against civilians depress voter turnout? Evidence from Bosnia and Herzegovina
• Do government ideology and fragmentation matter for reducing CO2-emissions? Empirical evidence from OECD countries
• Political competition and the Roman Catholic schools: Ontario, Canada
• Criticism of democracy [wikipedia]
• Information and strategic voting. [europepmc]
• Referendum opposition to fluoridation and health literacy: a cross-sectional analysis conducted in three large US cities. [europepmc]
• Cracking the whip: spatial voting with party discipline and voter polarization. [europepmc]
• Political uncertainty moderates neural evaluation of incongruent policy positions. [europepmc]
• Is a Rational Politics of Disaster Possible? Making Useful Decisions for Others in an Experimental Disaster Game. [europepmc]
• The Rise of Populism and the Reconfiguration of the German Political Space. [europepmc]
• What influences attitudes about artificial intelligence adoption: Evidence from U.S. local officials. [europepmc]
• Using Facebook data to predict the 2016 U.S. presidential election. [europepmc]
• The Impact of COVID-19 on the Support for the German AfD: Jumping the Populist Ship or Staying the Course? [europepmc]
• Political differentiation and consolidation of choice in a U.S. media malaise environment: indirect effects of perceived alikeness on voter participation. [europepmc]
• Contrastive multiple correspondence analysis (cMCA): Using contrastive learning to identify latent subgroups in political parties. [europepmc]
• Social networks and voter turnout. [europepmc]
• Non-News Websites Expose People to More Political Content Than News Websites: Evidence from Browsing Data in Three Countries. [europepmc]
• Exploring the typology of decision-makers, institutions, and incentives that shape health decisions in Pakistan and insulate decision makers from citizens feedback. [europepmc]
• Persuadable voters decided the 2022 midterm: Abortion rights and issues-based frameworks for studying election outcomes. [europepmc]
• An evolutionary game study on the collaborative governance of environmental pollution: from the perspective of regulatory capture. [europepmc]
• What determines voting behavior to host the Olympic games in the Rhine-Ruhr area: a multilevel model. [europepmc]
• On or off topic? Understanding the effects of issue-related political targeted ads. [europepmc]
• Enhancing the Cohesion and Influence of Minority Opinions Through Clustering: A Social Network Experiment. [europepmc]
• Voting behavior and mortality risk in older adults: Evidence from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study. [europepmc]
• What Factors Influenced Young Adults to Vote in the 2020 Presidential Election? [europepmc]
• A supranational solidaristic space? Comparative appraisal of determinants of individual support for European solidarity in the COVID-19 era [europepmc]