Estimating Fact-checking's Effects: Evidence From a Long-term Experiment During Campaign 2014

This study reports the first experimental estimates of the longitudinal effects of exposure to fact-checking. We also conduct a comprehensive panel study of attitudes toward fact-checking and how they change during a campaign.Our results are generally encouraging. The public has very positive views of fact-checking and, when randomly exposed to it, comes to view the format even more favorably. Moreover, randomized exposure to fact-checks helps people become better informed, substantially increasing knowledge of the issues under discussion.We also document several important challenges facing fact-checkers, however. Most notably, interest in the format is skewed towards more educated and informed members of the public. Republicans also have less favorable views of the practice than Democrats. Continued growth of the medium will depend on broadening its appeal to these groups

The Diffusion of Fact-checking: Understanding the Growth of a Journalistic Innovation

How and why is political fact-checking spreading across journalism? The research presented in this report suggests that the challenge of disseminating the practice is significant -- mere proximity does not appear to be sufficient to drive adoption. However, we find that factchecking can be effectively promoted by appealing to the professional values of journalists.Our first study considers whether journalists might emulate their colleagues in emphasizing fact-checking, following the practices of professional peers in the way that other journalistic innovations have disseminated. However, the practice does not appear to diffuse organically within a state press corps. While fact-checking coverage increased dramatically during the 2012 campaign, these effects were concentrated among outlets with dedicated fact-checkers. We find no evidence that fact-checking coverage increased more from 2008 to 2012 among outlets in states with a PolitiFact affiliate than among those in states with no affiliate.However, it is possible to effectively promote fact-checking. In a field experiment during the 2014 campaign, we find that messages promoting the genre as a high-status practice that is consistent with journalistic values significantly increased newspapers' fact-checking coverage versus a control group, while messages emphasizing audience demand for the format did not (yielding a smaller, statistically insignificant increase). These results suggest that efforts to create or extend dedicated fact-checking operations and to train reporters are the most effective way to disseminate the practice of fact-checking. While audience demand is an important part of the business case for the practice, newsrooms appear to respond most to messages emphasizing how fact-checking is consistent with the best practices and highest aspirations of their field

Misinformation and Fact-checking: Research Findings from Social Science

Citizens and journalists are concerned about the prevalence of misinformation in contemporary politics, which may pollute democratic discourse and undermine citizens' ability to cast informed votes and participate meaningfully in public debate. Academic research in this area paints a pessimistic picture -- the most salient misperceptions are widely held, easily spread, and difficult to correct. Corrections can fail due to factors including motivated reasoning, limitations of memory and cognition, and identity factors such as race and ethnicity. Nonetheless, there is reason to be optimistic about the potential for effectively correcting misperceptions, particularly among people who are genuinely open to the facts. In this report, we offer a series of practical recommendations for journalists, civic educators, and others who hope to reduce misperceptions

Casualties, Polls, and the Iraq War

In their article “Success Matters: Casualty Sensitivity and the War in Iraq,” Christopher Gelpi, Peter Feaver, and Jason Reifler attempt to flush out the relationship between public opinion and the use of force as it pertains to the Iraq war.1 The authors promote the following proposition: “Our thesis is that expectations of future success are the key determinants of public casualty tolerance. That is, the U.S. public can accept that the war is not yet won and will involve continued and even mounting costs, provided that events thus far are not convincing it that eventual success is impossible” (p. 24). This statement actually contains two theses. First, public support for a military operation will not necessarily wane in the face of rising casualties.2 Second, the public’s tolerance for casualties is most affected by its expectation of victory (i.e., ultimate strategic success). These theses are consistent with Feaver and Gelpi’s argument in their earlier work: “Casualty phobia is not the dominant feature of the general public. On the contrary, policymakers can tap into a large reservoir of support for missions, even missions that entail a fairly high human price, provided those missions are successful. The public is defeat phobic, not casualty phobic.”3 Applying this argument to Iraq, Gelpi, Feaver, and Reifler assert that, as long as Americans expect victory, they will tolerate mounting casualties and thus support the war. Put another way, they claim that opposition to the Iraq war is driven not by casualties per se, but by the expectation of failure: “When the public believes that the mission will succeed, it continues to support the mission, even as costs mount. When the public thinks victory is unlikely, even small costs will cause support to plummet” (pp. 15–16). To test their theses, Gelpi, Feaver, and Reifler begin by trying to establish that rising casualties do not necessarily produce a corresponding drop in public support. To do this, they tracked presidential approval ratings against casualties over a twenty-month period (from March 2003 through October 2004) and divided this period into three phases of the war

Success Matters: Casualty Sensitivity and the War in Iraq

In this article, we argue that the public will tolerate significant numbers of U.S. combat casualties under certain circumstances. To be sure, the public is not indifferent to the human costs of American foreign policy, but casualties have not by themselves driven public attitudes toward the Iraq war, and mounting casualties have not always produced a reduction in public support. The Iraq case suggests that under the right conditions, the public will continue to support military operations even when they come with a relatively high human cost. Our core argument is that the U.S. public’s tolerance for the human costs of war is primarily shaped by the intersection of two crucial attitudes: beliefs about the rightness or wrongness of the war, and beliefs about a war’s likely success. The impact of each attitude depends upon the other. Ultimately, however, we and that beliefs about the likelihood of success matter most in determining the public’s willingness to tolerate U.S. military deaths in combat

Iraq the Vote: Retrospective and Prospective Foreign Policy Judgments on Candidate Choice and Casualty Tolerance

In this article, we model the effect of foreign policy attitudes on both vote choice and casualty tolerance, using survey data collected during the 2004 election. We show that prospective judgments of the likelihood of success in Iraq and retrospective judgments of whether the war in Iraq was right are significant determinants of both vote choice and casualty tolerance. The prospective judgment of success is key in predicting casualty tolerance, while retrospective judgment of whether the war was right takes precedence in determining vote choice. In addition, there is an important interaction between the two variables, so the effect of one is conditional on the value of the other. We believe this is compelling evidence that foreign policy matters, and that it matters in reasonable ways

Getting tough with the dragon? The comparative correlates of foreign policy attitudes toward China in the United States and UK

A large body of research suggests mass publics are capable of thinking coherently about international relations. We extend this body of research to show that domain relevant postures – in our case, more abstract beliefs about foreign policy – are related to how tough of a line representative samples of US and UK respondents want their governments to take toward China. More specifically, we utilize a unique comparative survey of American and British foreign policy attitudes to show broad support for toughness toward China. Beliefs about the use of the military and attitudes regarding globalization help explain preferences for tough economic and military policies toward China. In the two countries, the relationship between general foreign policy outlooks and the positions citizens take is robust to the addition of a general mediator that controls for the general affect those surveyed have toward China. Finally, the strength of the relationship between these abstract postures and specific preferences for a China policy are different across the countries

The structure of foreign policy attitudes in transatlantic perspective: comparing the United States, United Kingdom, France and Germany

While public opinion about foreign policy has been studied extensively in the United States, there is less systematic research of foreign policy opinions in other countries. Given that public opinion about international affairs affects who gets elected in democracies and then constrains the foreign policies available to leaders once elected, both comparative politics and international relations scholarship benefit from more systematic investigation of foreign policy attitudes outside the United States. Using new data, this article presents a common set of core constructs structuring both American and European attitudes about foreign policy. Surveys conducted in four countries (the United States, the United Kingdom, France and Germany) provide an expanded set of foreign policy‐related survey items that are analysed using exploratory structural equation modeling (ESEM). Measurement equivalence is specifically tested and a common four‐factor structure that fits the data in all four countries is found. Consequently, valid, direct comparisons of the foreign policy preferences of four world powers are made. In the process, the four‐factor model confirms and expands previous work on the structure of foreign policy attitudes. The article also demonstrates the capability of ESEM in testing the dimensionality and cross‐national equivalence of social science concepts

Populist referendum : Was 'Brexit' an expression of nativist and anti-elitist sentiment?

Was the outcome of the United Kingdom’s ‘Brexit’ referendum to leave the European Union a visible and consequential manifestation of right-wing populism? After all, skepticism in the UK towards the EU predates the recent rise of European right wing populism. Original survey data show, however, that the interaction of nativist sentiment and anti-elitist attitudes, the cocktail of right-wing populism, led to widespread support for Brexit, even while controlling for other factors. Although hostility to immigrants was an important factor, nativists were particularly prone to vote ‘leave’; if they also did not trust political elites, a crucial element of populism. Further underscoring this explanation is the conditional effect of anti-elite sentiment. The relationship between anti-elite sentiment and support for leaving the EU only exists among those with high nativist sentiment; among those low in nativist sentiment, anti-elite feelings did not increase support for Brexit

A unified theory of value-based reasoning and U.S. public opinion

Public opinion research shows that American citizens utilize domain-specific political values to guide opinion formation in the key issue areas that comprise the American political agenda. One set of political values operates on economic welfare opinions, a different set of values applies to cultural issue positions, a third set shapes foreign policy preferences, and so on in other policy domains. Drawing on Shalom Schwartz’s theory of basic human values, this paper argues that two socially focused values—self-transcendence and conservation—guide opinion formation across all major policy domains. By contrast, the personally focused values of self-enhancement and openness-to-change should play a more limited role in preference formation. These hypotheses are tested using data from a novel 2011 national survey and the 2012 General Social Survey. The statistical results affirm expectations. We show that self-transcendence and conservation values predict scores on symbolic ideology, economic conservatism, racial conservatism, cultural conservatism, civil liberties, and foreign policy opinions. Self-enhancement and openness-to-change values play a modest role in shaping preferences