PRESENTA: Oscar Barrera (Paris School of Economics) / COMENTA: Germán Rosati (UNSAM)
Jueves 21 de Junio de 11 a 13 hs. en el aula 468 en el sexto piso del Edificio Anexo de la Facultad de Ciencias Económicas de la UBA (Uriburu 781).
Abstract
How persuasive are “alternative facts,” i.e., misleading or outright false statements by populist politicians, in convincing voters? How effective is fact checking in countervailing the alternative facts? We conduct a randomized online experiment to address these questions in the context of the 2017 French presidential election campaign. Marine Le Pen (MLP), the extreme-right candidate who reached the runoff, regularly used alternative facts in support of her policy proposals, to which mainstream media responded with systematic fact checking. We expose randomly selected subgroups of a sample of 2480 voting-age French to quotes from MLP containing misleading information about immigration and/or to facts from official sources. We find that alternative facts are highly persuasive: voters exposed to MLP rhetoric move their policy conclusions and voting intensions toward MLP. Fact checking does nothing to undo these effects despite improving factual knowledge of voters. Being exposed only to official facts also backfires on voting intentions, as it increases political support for MLP (although to a smaller extent than alternative facts), despite moving posteriors about facts toward the truth.
Descargar: Facts, Alternative Facts, and Fact Checking in Times of Post-Truth Politics
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