Does Electoral Competition Create Incentives for Political Parties to Collect Information about the Pros and Cons of Alternative Policies?∗

A well-known rationale for representative democracy is that direct democ-racy leads to a free-rider problem as to the collection of information. A prob-lem with this rationale is that it takes for granted that representatives collect information. In this paper we examine whether or not electoral competition induces political parties or candidates to collect information about policy con-sequences. We show that the answer to this question depends on the cost of information collection. More surprisingly, we find that endogenizing informa-tion may lead to divergence of policy platforms. Key words: information collection, spatial voting model