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

TL;DR

This paper models how strategic voter communication leads to echo chambers and influences political advertising strategies, revealing that bias direction and network information efficiency critically shape political dynamics.

Contribution

It introduces a model showing endogenous formation of echo chambers and how parties adapt advertising based on network information quality and voter bias.

Findings

Echo chambers form endogenously depending on bias direction.

Parties target opponent supporters when voter networks waste information.

Small ideological differences are insufficient for chamber formation.

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.