Discretionary disclosure and electoral accountability

Politicians often have discretion over what policy information to reveal to the public. This paper develops a formal model comparing electoral accountability under mandatory and discretionary disclosure. I identify a fundamental trade-off between detection − where voters directly observe wrongdoing − and inference − where voters penalize the suspicious absence of information. Mandates facilitate detection but eliminate the strategic signal embedded in discretionary disclosure. Mandates weaken the connection between silence and possible wrongdoing, effectively exonerating the incumbent in voters’ inferences. The model demonstrates that when the baseline probability of information transmission is high, the inference-based mechanism constrains rent-seeking more effectively than the detection-based mechanism. Consequently, disclosure mandates can paradoxically weaken electoral discipline: by making silence less informative, they undermine voters’ ability to draw inferences from silence, even while increasing the overall probability that voters observe policy outcomes.