The classic account of how voters use party labels to reduce their uncertainty at the polls is provided by Anthony Downs in An Economic Theory of Democracy. A fundamental assumption motivating Downs's work is that citizens wish to invest an optimal amount of personal resources into the acquisition of political information that they may then use to guide their political behavior. In the language of neoclassical economics, voters should therefore seek information up to the level where its marginal cost equals its marginal benefit. Because people receive virtually no private return from casting an informed ballot, this means that voters should incur virtually no costs in information search.

According to Downs, it is fortunate for democracies everywhere that office-motivated politicians have incentives to solve this problem by providing information to voters during the course of election campaigns and that party brand names provide a particularly useful vehicle for conveying that information. He argues that the actions that parties take when in government, and the consequences of those actions for the average person, provide voters with readily available information (i.e., who is in power and whether times are good) to evaluate the performance of the incumbent party. If times are good, voters are likely to believe the incumbent party's promise to continue these policies, knowing that the incumbent party will want to build a reputation for delivering a certain set of outcomes to the electorate.