Political Knowledge and Information Processing in Developing Democracies

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

What do voters know and how do they process information? Ultimately, these questions matter gravely for the functioning of democracy. If citizens are ill-informed, misinformed or cannot extract accurate political information from the world they observe, it is difficult to hold leaders accountable and to discern between electoral alternatives. The papers in this panel offer a fresh take on these issues based on the analysis of original evidence. While the data for all papers come from Latin America, the issues addressed are quite general and of interest to other developing democracies.

Substantively, the papers focus on different aspects of political life and diverse public opinion arenas; they discuss knowledge and information about social-rights, corruption, (false) rumors, as well as about exogenous economic shocks. Two papers address information spreading through virtual social networks, and two focus on "correction" of beliefs that are objectively wrong. The outcomes of interest include voting, levels of knowledge, and "correction" of beliefs. Three papers are experimental (one of which reports on a field experiment) while the other develops new measurement instruments to distinguish between different types of political information.

Together, the papers in this panel contribute to further our understanding about how voters actually learn about politically relevant issues in developing democracies, and how information and knowledge shapes their political behavior. Collectively, the papers find that not all forms of political knowledge spread equally, that "correcting" objectively wrong beliefs is no simple task, but that message saturation might accomplish this.

Sub Unit

• Division 12: Comparative Politics of Developing Countries

Chair

• Shelby Grossman Stanford University

Discussant

• Noam Lupu Vanderbilt University

Individual Presentations

• Knowledge of Social Rights and Access to State Services: Evidence from Brazil - Matthew S. Winters, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• Affective Judgements, Learning, and the Misattribution of Responsibility - Cesar Zucco, Getulio Vargas Foundation; Daniela Campello, Getulio Vargas Foundation

• The Prevalence of Fake News and the Effectiveness of Corrective Information - Frederico Batista Pereira, University of North Carolina at Charlotte; Nara Pavão, UFPE; Felipe Nunes, UFMG; Natalia Salgado Bueno, Emory University

• Online Information: Facebook Ads, Electorate Saturation, and Accountability - José Ramón Enríquez, Harvard University; Alberto Simpser, Instituto Tecnologico Autonomo de Mexico