Political Advocacy with Collective Decision Making?

The model presented in this paper captures some of the eects of a pre-electoral debate on the incentives for information acquisition of voters that belong to dier- 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