Echo Chambers: Voter-to-Voter Communication and Political Competition

Abstract

I study how strategic communication among voters shapes both political outcomes and parties' advertising strategies in a model of informative campaign advertising. Two main results are derived. First, echo chambers arise endogenously. Surprisingly, a small ideological distance between voters is not sufficient to guarantee that a chamber is created, bias direction plays a crucial role. Second, when voters' network entails a significant waste of information, parties tailor their advertising to the opponent's supporters rather than to their own.