What do you know about your mayor? Voters’ information and jurisdiction size

This paper examines which set of informations voters use when they cast their vote. On the one hand, electoral accountability models assume that voters rely on past policy decisions of the incumbent politician. Gathering this information is, however, often costly. On the other hand, voters may prefer to rely on low-cost information, such as politicians’ personal observable characteristics. If incentives to collect costly information decrease as the size of the jurisdiction increases, a greater share of voters should take these “information shortcuts” in larger municipalities. To test those hypotheses, we use an original dataset encompassing 896 French municipalities of more than 10,000 inhabitants over the period 2000-2012. We find that although there is no correlation between mayors’ competence and their observable characteristics, voters rely on such information shortcuts. Mayors’ past policy-making matters only in small municipalities.