Despair or Defiance? Assessing Turnout Effects of Election Misinformation

• In Event: Misinformation: Effects

Abstract

Following the 2020 general election, Republican elected officials, including President Donald Trump, promoted conspiracy theories claiming that Joe Biden’s close victory in Georgia was fraudulent. Extant literature suggests two hypotheses regarding effects these conspiracy theories could have had on Republican turnout in the Senate runoff elections that took place the following January. Conspiracies regarding rigged elections could lower adherents’ external efficacy, signaling that voting doesn’t matter, which would predict that they would be less likely to vote in the runoffs than non-adherents. At the same time, conspiracy theories stoke political anger, which would predict heightened commitment to voting. We test these hypotheses by combining behavioral measures of engagement with conspiracy-theory-related content and administrative data on voter turnout at the individual level by linking the accounts of 40,000 Twitter users in Georgia to the voter file. Our analyses consider 1) turnout among Trump supporters versus politically interested Twitter users (as measured through ‘likes’ and retweets); 2) turnout among Twitter users who specifically liked or retweeted election conspiracy content, controlling for other likes and retweets of other Trump content; and 3) differences in turnout for 1 and 2 for users liking or retweeting angry versus sad content. Finally, we analyze tweet content to assess external efficacy -- whether conspiracies at the time of the Georgia election runoff still implied faith in electoral institutions (e.g. that ultimately only “legal votes” would be counted).

Authors

• Stefan McCabe, Northeastern University

• Jon Green, Northeastern University

• William Hobbs, Cornell University

• David Lazer, Northeastern University