Meddling in the 2016 Elections and Satisfaction with Democracy in the US

• In Event: Media and Information Effects on Public Opinion

Abstract

Over the past two years, research efforts by investigative journalists and government agencies have uncovered and publicized credible evidence of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential elections. In this paper, we pursue three main goals. First, we will measure how much the American public knows about “meddling” in the 2016 Presidential election. Second, we will investigate individual-level opinions about the accuracy of existing news media reporting on the same subject. Third, we explore beliefs about the impact of Russian election interference.

After presenting these descriptive findings, we then proceed to study the influence of individual-level knowledge and beliefs about Russian election meddling on satisfaction with democracy. We have the following theoretical expectations. First, people with higher levels of knowledge about Russian election meddling should be less likely to express satisfaction with the democratic process. Second, this relationship should be moderated by beliefs about the accuracy of reporting on this issue. Third, knowledge about election interference should have a stronger (negative) effect on our dependent variable for Democrats (“electoral losers”) than for Republicans (“electoral winners”). Our empirical analysis is based on a nationally representative sample of the U.S. adult population (to be collected during the spring of 2019). Our paper adds to the research agenda on democratic satisfaction and the well-known winner/loser framework in this literature.

Authors

• Florian Justwan, University of Idaho

• Bert Baumgaertner, University of Idaho