Political Advocacy with Collective Decision Making政治倡导与集体决策.pdfVIP

Political Advocacy with Collective Decision Making Sophie Bade and Andrew Rice Penn State University 1 Abstract The model presented in this paper captures some of the effects of a pre-electoral debate on the incentives for information acquisition of voters that belong to differ- ent ideological strands. We introduce the option to publicly share information into a fairly standard model of information aggregation through an election with costly information acquisition. We find that this option dramatically changes the incen- tives to acquire information. Without the option to share one’s signal no extremist has any incentive to acquire information. With this option present the extremists’ incentive to acquire information is even stronger than the independents’ incentive. In equilibrium this extra incentive leads the extremists acquire more information than the independents. We use this to explain the empirically observed correlation between extremism and information. JEL Classification: D72; D82; D83 Key words: Information acquisition; Debates; Persuasion; Condorcet; Extremism We thank Kalyan Chatterjee, Ed Green, Yao Huang, Jim Jordan, Vijay Krishna, Joris Pinkse, and seminar participants at the economic theory seminar at Cal Tech, the political science seminar at NYU, and the political economy seminar at North- western (MEDS) for their insightful comments. Sophie Bade wishes to thank El- mar Wolfstetter and Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), SFB Transregio 15, “Governance and Efficiency of Economic Systems.”, TP A7 for their hospitality while working on this project. This paper was originally titled “Pre-Electoral De- bate: The Case of a Large Election”. 1 Department of Economics, Penn State University, 518 Kern Graduate Building, University Park, PA 16802-3306, USA. Ph