The Effect of Post-truth Rhetoric on Changes in Citizens’ Voting Behaviour

• In Event: What to Believe? Facts in a Post-truth World

Abstract

Does post-truth rhetoric communicated by political parties influence voter choice? I propose a shift in discussing post-truth dissociating it from the misinformation objective facts dichotomy to associating it with political discourse. Whereas current literature focuses on testing the effectiveness of misinformation, fake news, and motivated reasoning on political behaviour, I operationalise post-truth discourse using features of lack, fantasy and emotionality in a vignette endorsement survey experiment. Taking the United Kingdom as an example of liberal democracy, I implement the survey experiment on a random sample of 800 people to test their changes in voting preferences when exposed to post-truth statements. Specifically, I test the mechanism tying trust in post-truth rhetoric associated with a political party they support and the decision to uphold their political position. The survey uses variations of rhetoric vignettes leveraging on post-truth, lie, and facts statements to estimate the effects of post-truth rhetoric on trustworthiness perceptions and voting intentions. Since post-truth is defined with political discourse, it provides the basis to measure the persuasiveness of post-truth rhetoric as opposed to other forms of rhetoric, such as lying on trustworthiness and voting intentions. I registered a pre-analysis plan for the survey experiment at the OSF repository. The main findings of the experiment are two-fold: (i) post-truth rhetoric has higher effects on citizen’s decisions to change their voting intentions than both factual and lie statements; (ii) an individual is more likely to trust post-truth rhetoric than the lie and factual rhetoric. The study shows the effectiveness post-truth discourses can have for mobilizing strategies and can ground themselves in society as an ‘alternative’ reality. Such a study has implications on how truth is perceived as well as the impact of post-truth discourse on political behaviour. This experiment is fundamental to fostering, increasing, and broadening the nascent research on this underrepresented field.

Author

• Anam Kuraishi, University of Antwerp