Why Retractions of Numerical Misinformation Fail: The Anchoring Effect of Inaccurate Numbers in the News

2021 ◽  
pp. 107769902110218
Author(s):  
Marlis Stubenvoll ◽  
Jörg Matthes
Keyword(s):  
Real World ◽  
Survey Experiment ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Anchoring Effect ◽  
Critical Information ◽  
News Consumption ◽  
Anchoring Bias

Numbers can convey critical information about political issues, yet statistics are sometimes cited incorrectly by political actors. Drawing on real-world examples of numerical misinformation, the current study provides a first test of the anchoring bias in the context of news consumption. Anchoring describes how evidently wrong and even irrelevant numbers might change people’s judgments. Results of a survey experiment with a sample of N = 413 citizens indicate that even when individuals see a retraction and distrust the presented misinformation, they stay biased toward the initially seen inaccurate number.

scholarly journals Partisan Disagreements Arising from Rationalization of Common Information

2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 477-492 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin E. Lauderdale
Keyword(s):  
The Political ◽  
Survey Experiment ◽  
Experimental Demonstration ◽  
Cross Sectional ◽  
Political Issue ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
Quantitative Evidence ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Common Information ◽  
Political World

Why do opposing partisans sometimes disagree about the facts and processes that are relevant to understanding political issues? One explanation is that citizens may have a psychological tendency toward adopting beliefs about the political world that rationalize their partisan preferences. Previous quantitative evidence for rationalization playing a role in explaining partisan factual disagreement has come from cross-sectional covariation and from correction experiments. In this paper, I argue that these rationalizations can occur as side effects when citizens change their attitudes in response to partisan cues and substantively relevant facts about a political issue. Following this logic, I motivate and report the results of a survey experiment that provides US Republicans and Democrats with information that they will be inclined to rationalize in different ways, because they have different beliefs about which political actors they should agree with. The results are a novel experimental demonstration that partisan disagreements about the political world can arise from rationalization.

scholarly journals Judicial Institutionalization and Judicial Activism of the Post-Communist Constitutional Courts

2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kirill M. Bumin
Keyword(s):  
Executive Power ◽  
Contextual Influences ◽  
Constitutional Courts ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
Constitutional Review ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Policy Choices ◽  
Policy Goals ◽  
Accession Process ◽  
Decision Making Behavior

In applying constitutional review, post-communist constitutional courts are affected by the existing political and institutional environments, as well as by their own institutional capabilities. However, our understanding of the activity of the post-communist constitutional courts remains incomplete because the existing research fails to consider how the institutional changes on these courts affect their decision-making behavior. In this study, I examine the activity of nineteen post-communist constitutional courts during the 1992-2006 period. I use an aggregate, time-series measure of judicial institutionalization to show that higher levels of institutionalization enhance these constitutional courts’ ability to pursue their policy goals and influence the degree to which they invalidate policy choices of other major political actors, while lower levels of institutionalization limit the courts’ impact on legal and political issues. The findings of this analysis thus provide the first empirical confirmation of the importance of judicial institutionalization to the policy outputs of the post-communist constitutional courts. I also illustrate how various institutional and contextual influences, such as executive power, legislative fragmentation, economic conditions, EU accession process, the identity of the litigants, and the nature of the litigated issues, influence the activity of post-communist constitutional courts. 

Dimensions of Variation in Electoral Systems

2017 ◽  
pp. 22-40
Author(s):  
Michael Gallagher ◽  
Paul Mitchell
Keyword(s):  
Real World ◽  
Electoral Systems ◽  
Electoral System ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Political Consequences ◽  
Policy Choices ◽  
District Magnitude ◽  
Essential Components ◽  
Seat Allocation ◽  
Dimensions Of Variation

Electoral systems matter. They are a crucial link in the chain connecting the preferences of citizens to the policy choices made by governments. They are chosen by political actors and, once in existence, have political consequences for those actors. This chapter argues that electoral system choice is a highly consequential matter for democratic states and offers a comparative overview of the principal means by which electoral systems vary. What are the essential components of real-world electoral systems? The chapter emphasizes the importance of district magnitude, ballot structure (with three main types: categorical, dividual, and ordinal), “levels” of seat allocation, methods of selecting candidates within parties, and devices for limiting proportionality.

Partisan Alignment, Performance, and Citizen Approval of Political Actors

2019 ◽  
Vol 47 (6) ◽  
pp. 1345-1357
Author(s):  
Daniel J. Lyons ◽  
Susan M. Miller
Keyword(s):  
Survey Experiment ◽  
Performance Information ◽  
Substantial Evidence ◽  
Chief Executives ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Broad Policy ◽  
Positive Effect ◽  
Insight Into

There is substantial evidence that citizen assessments of political actors and associated institutions are shaped by shared partisanship. However, much of this evidence comes from citizen evaluations of political actors who are policy generalists—officials elected with broad policy jurisdictions (e.g., chief executives and legislators). We suggest that citizen assessments of policy specialists—officials elected with relatively narrow policy jurisdictions (e.g., labor commissioners and education secretaries)—may be shaped to a lesser degree by shared partisan leanings than evaluations of policy generalists. Using a survey experiment, we find evidence that, among out-partisans, favorable performance information has a greater positive effect for specialists than generalists, highlighting one way in which shared partisanship may be less influential for evaluations of specialists. These results may help to provide insight into the diversity of partisanship we see across policy generalists and specialists within the same governments and have potential implications for accountability.

How an author’s mind made stories: Emotion and ethics in Tagore’s short fiction

2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 158-178
Author(s):  
Patrick Colm Hogan
Keyword(s):  
Real World ◽  
Short Fiction ◽  
Gender Ideology ◽  
Political Imagination ◽  
Social Production ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
Rabindranath Tagore ◽  
Political Consequences ◽  
The Social ◽  
Ethical Virtues

AbstractAuthors may be understood as producing stories from their narrative idiolects. Narrative idiolects are sets of principles that enable the simulation of possible sequences of causally connected events. Such idiolects include prototypes that define classes of stories. These prototypes or proto-stories are complexes of cognitive and affective structures that guide the interpretation of real-world events as well as the production of fictions. Like everyone, Rabindranath Tagore had a range of proto-stories. But one was particularly important for him. This was a proto-story based on attachment, the sort of bonding that first of all characterizes the relations of parents and young children. This proto-story centers on the formation and violation of attachment relations, with the ethical and political issues that surround such violation. Specifically, Tagore’s ethical and political imagination was largely guided by the norm of securely developing attachment. It was elaborated into stories by reference to deviations from that norm. Those deviations are caused by attachment threat or loss. In connection with these points, Tagore’s attachment proto-story suggests two key ethical virtues – attachment sensitivity and attachment openness. These, in turn, may be disturbed by the social production of shame, often in relation to gender ideology. This essay examines Tagore’s attachment proto-story and its ethical and political consequences.

Law and Politics in Germany

1978 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 348-362 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Blair
Keyword(s):  
Easy Access ◽  
The Political ◽  
Constitutional Court ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Law And Politics ◽  
Basic Rights ◽  
The Social ◽  
Federal Constitutional ◽  
Post War

German politics are still influenced by the tradition of legalism. Constitutional provisions often serve as criteria of political argument, and constitutional principles (e.g. the ‘social state’) and basic rights may be portrayed as programmatic ‘commandments' justifying specific political demands. The corollary is a propensity towards judicial, and thus ‘authoritative’, solutions to political disputes. The post-war establishment of the Federal Constitutional Court with comprehensive constitutional jurisdiction and easy access for the political actors has subjected major political issues to legal adjudication. Increasingly appeal to the Court has become a weapon of opposition, resorted to by the Christian Democrats to challenge such measures as the Basic Treaty with East Germany and the Abortion Reform. Despite general self-restraint vis-à-vis the political authorities, the Court has sometimes construed basic rights expansively as ‘participatory’ rights to positive government action. Recently it has been criticised for ‘conservatism’ and a tendency to restrict future legislative discretion. The ‘politicization of justice’, emerging from the judicialization of politics, could affect respect for the Court as authoritative arbiter. But it may foster a healthier relationship between politics and the law.

How right-wing versus cosmopolitan political actors mobilize and translate images of immigrants in transnational contexts

2017 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 315-336 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicole Doerr
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Contentious Politics ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
People's Party ◽  
The Right ◽  
Syrian Refugee Crisis

This article examines visual posters and symbols constructed and circulated transnationally by various political actors to mobilize contentious politics on the issues of immigration and citizenship. Following right-wing mobilizations focusing on the Syrian refugee crisis, immigration has become one of the most contentious political issues in Western Europe. Right-wing populist political parties have used provocative visual posters depicting immigrants or refugees as ‘criminal foreigners’ or a ‘threat to the nation’, in some countries and contexts conflating the image of the immigrant with that of the Islamist terrorist. This article explores the transnational dynamics of visual mobilization by comparing the translation of right-wing nationalist with left-wing, cosmopolitan visual campaigns on the issue of immigration in Western Europe. The author first traces the crosscultural translation and sharing of an anti-immigrant poster created by the Swiss People’s Party (SVP), a right-wing political party, inspiring different extremist as well as populist right-wing parties and grassroots activists in several other European countries. She then explores how left-libertarian social movements try to break racist stereotypes of immigrants. While right-wing political activists create a shared stereotypical image of immigrants as foes of an imaginary ethnonationalist citizenship, left-wing counter-images construct a more complex and nuanced imagery of citizenship and cultural diversity in Europe. The findings show the challenges of progressive activists’ attempts to translate cosmopolitan images of citizenship across different national and linguistic contexts in contrast to the right wing’s rapid and effective instrumentalizing and translating of denigrating images of minorities in different contexts.

scholarly journals Ideological Asymmetries in Motivated Reasoning and the Mechanisms of Attitude Polarization: A Two-Wave Survey Experiment

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Davide Morisi ◽  
Matthew H. Goldberg ◽  
John Jost
Keyword(s):  
Social Networks ◽  
Motivated Reasoning ◽  
Social Cues ◽  
Survey Experiment ◽  
Social Conformity ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
Attitude Polarization ◽  
Ideological Polarization ◽  
Balanced Information ◽  
The U.S

Are there specific motives that lead individuals to become extreme in their political attitudes after exposure to information? Can these motives explain recent evidence that attitude polariza-tion occurs more on the conservative than the liberal side? We propose that two mechanisms, related to relational motives to engage in social conformity and epistemic motives to reduce uncertainty, might contribute to answering these questions. We used experimental manipula-tions to induce relational and epistemic motives in a two-wave survey experiment, in which we exposed participants to balanced information pertaining highly salient political issues in the U.S. Our results suggest that relational motives to maintain homogenous social networks are highly pertinent to how people, especially political conservatives, process information and make up their minds about important social and political issues. When exposed to social cues indicating where liberals and conservatives stand on specific issues, the two groups became fur-ther apart in their attitudes. Furthermore, we observed that, in the presence of social cues, con-servatives were more likely to develop extreme attitudes than liberals, triggering asymmetric polarization. Contrary to our predictions, however, we did not obtain consistent evidence of in-creased ideological polarization when epistemic motives to reduce uncertainty were present, although we found that conservatives (and not liberals) displayed a stronger confirmation bias in the evaluation of political arguments when uncertainty was high (compared to low).

New Media and Politics: A Synopsis of Theories, Issues, and Research

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ran Wei ◽  
Larry Zhiming Xu
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Information And Communication Technologies ◽  
Political Communication ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
Communication Technologies ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
International Setting ◽  
Information And Communication ◽  
Media Systems

The ongoing revolution in information and communication technologies (ICTs) has fundamentally transformed the landscape of democracy and the way people engage in politics. From the configuration of media systems to the decision-making of the voting public, the changes have permeated through almost every level of society, affecting political institutions, political actors, citizen groups, and mass media. For each aspect, a synopsis of classical and emergent political communication theories, contemporary and contentious political issues, and cutting-edge research adds to the discussion of new media. The discussion is unfolded with an account of research of new media effects on politics in international setting and cross-cultural contexts with insights of how Western theories and research apply (or fail to) in international contexts.

Online Versus Offline Strategies in Comparative Perspective

2019 ◽  
pp. 903-924
Author(s):  
Tiago Silva
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Political Communication ◽  
News Coverage ◽  
Political Information ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Media Campaigns ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Electoral Campaigns ◽  
The Press

The Internet has undoubtedly become, in this last decade, an important new arena for political communication. Nonetheless, during electoral campaigns, the use of this medium poses both challenges and advantages for the institutional communication made by political parties and candidates. An often-overlooked advantage is the possibility, particularly on social media, for parties and candidates to bypass journalists and communicate directly to a large and varied audience. This aspect is particularly relevant since the literature has been noting, in the last decades, a decline in the salience of substantive political information in the mainstream news coverage of political events. By comparing the political actors’ campaigns on social media with press news coverage of those campaigns, this chapter examines the role and impact of the Internet on modern political communication. An extensive content analysis of four electoral campaigns in four different countries (United States, Italy, Brazil, and Portugal) shows that candidates’ and parties’ online campaigns, compared to news articles in the press, tend to be more frequently framed in terms of substantive political issues. Even though there are differences between political actors and the social media platforms used (Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube), the results suggest that, overall, candidates and parties do actually try to convey substantive political information when communicating directly to the electorate. Furthermore, compared to articles in the press, social media campaigns also tend to be less frequently framed in terms of conflict, political scandals, and strategy aspects.

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