Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-vdxz6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-23T03:36:45.809Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Political Knowledge and Misinformation in the Era of Social Media: Evidence From the 2015 UK Election

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 December 2020

Kevin Munger Open the ORCID record for Kevin Munger [Opens in a new window] ,
Patrick J. Egan ,
Jonathan Nagler ,
Jonathan Ronen  and
Joshua Tucker
Kevin Munger*
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science and Social Data Analytics, Penn State University, State College, PA, USA
Patrick J. Egan
Affiliation:
Department of Politics, New York University, USA
Jonathan Nagler
Affiliation:
Department of Politics, Center of Data Science, and Social Media and Political Participation Laboratory, New York University, USA
Jonathan Ronen
Affiliation:
Berlin Institute for Medical Systems Biology, Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine, Berlin, Germany
Joshua Tucker
Affiliation:
Department of Politics, Department of Russian and Slavic Studies, Center of Data Science, and Social Media and Political Participation Laboratory, New York University, USA
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Does social media educate voters, or mislead them? This study measures changes in political knowledge among a panel of voters surveyed during the 2015 UK general election campaign while monitoring the political information to which they were exposed on the Twitter social media platform. The study's panel design permits identification of the effect of information exposure on changes in political knowledge. Twitter use led to higher levels of knowledge about politics and public affairs, as information from news media improved knowledge of politically relevant facts, and messages sent by political parties increased knowledge of party platforms. But in a troubling demonstration of campaigns' ability to manipulate knowledge, messages from the parties also shifted voters' assessments of the economy and immigration in directions favorable to the parties' platforms, leaving some voters with beliefs further from the truth at the end of the campaign than they were at its beginning.

Keywords

social mediapolitical campaignsUK parliamentpanel surveyspolitical knowledge
Type
Article
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 52 , Issue 1 , January 2022 , pp. 107 - 127
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Andersen, R, Tilley, J and Heath, AF (2005) Political knowledge and enlightened preferences: party choice through the electoral cycle. British Journal of Political Science 35(02), 285–302.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bail, CA et al. (2018) Exposure to opposing views on social media can increase political polarization. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 115(37), 9216–9221.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bakker, R et al. (2015) Measuring party positions in Europe: the Chapel Hill Expert Survey trend file, 1999–2010. Party Politics 21(1), 143–152.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Banducci, S, Giebler, H and Kritzinger, S (2017) Knowing more from less: how the information environment increases knowledge of party positions. British Journal of Political Science 47(3), 571–588.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barabas, J and Jerit, J (2009) Estimating the causal effects of media coverage on policy-specific knowledge. American Journal of Political Science 53(1), 73–89.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barabas, J et al. (2014) The question (s) of political knowledge. American Political Science Review 108(4), 840–855.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bartels, LM (1996) Uninformed votes: information effects in presidential elections. American Journal of Political Science, 194–230.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bartels, LM (2000) Partisanship and voting behavior, 1952–1996. American Journal of Political Science, 35–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clifford, S and Jerit, J (2016) Cheating on political knowledge questions in online surveys: an assessment of the problem and solutions. Public Opinion Quarterly 80(4), 858–887.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
CommOffice U (2019). News consumption in the UK: 2019. Available from https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0027/157914/uk-news-consumption-2019-report.pdf.Google Scholar
Delli Carpini, MX and Keeter, S (1997) What Americans Know About Politics and why it Matters. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Denver, D, Carman, C and Johns, R (2012) Elections and Voters in Britain. London: Macmillan International Higher Education.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Egan, PJ (2013) Partisan Priorities: How Issue Ownership Drives and Distorts American Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Evans, G and Mellon, J (2016) Working class votes and Conservative losses: solving the UKIP puzzle. Parliamentary Affairs 69(2), 464–479.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fowler, A and Margolis, M (2014) The political consequences of uninformed voters. Electoral Studies 34, 100–110.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gentzkow, M (2006) Television and voter turnout. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 931–972.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gentzkow, M, Shapiro, JM and Sinkinson, M (2014) Competition and ideological diversity: historical evidence from US newspapers. The American Economic Review 104(10), 3073–3114.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gilens, M, Vavreck, L and Cohen, M (2007) The mass media and the public's assessments of presidential candidates, 1952–2000. Journal of Politics 69(4), 1160–1175.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Guess, A (2018) (Almost) everything in moderation: new evidence in Americans’ online media diets (Unpublished manuscript). Retrieved from https://webspace.princeton.edu/users/aguess/Guess_OnlineMediaDiets.pdf (accessed 11 May 2020).Google Scholar
Herda, D (2010) How many immigrants? Foreign-born population innumeracy in Europe. Public Opinion Quarterly 74(4), 674–695.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Huber, GA and Arceneaux, K (2007) Identifying the persuasive effects of presidential advertising. American Journal of Political Science 51(4), 957–977.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Iyengar, S and Hahn, KS (2009) Red media, blue media: evidence of ideological selectivity in media use. Journal of Communication 59(1), 19–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Johnston, R, Hagen, MG and Jamieson, KH (2004) The 2000 Presidential Election and the Foundations of Party Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jungherr, A (2016) Twitter use in election campaigns: a systematic literature review. Journal of Information Technology & Politics 13(1), 72–91.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
King, G, Lam, P and Roberts, ME (2017) Computer-assisted keyword and document set discovery from unstructured text. American Journal of Political Science 61(4), 971–988.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kleinberg, MS and Lau, RR (2019) The importance of political knowledge for effective citizenship: differences between the broadcast and internet generations. Public Opinion Quarterly 83(2), 338–362.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Koch, JW (2008) Campaign advertisements’ impact on voter certainty and knowledge of house candidates’ ideological positions. Political Research Quarterly 61(4), 609–621.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lau, RR and Redlawsk, DP (2001) Advantages and disadvantages of cognitive heuristics in political decision making. American Journal of Political Science, 951–971.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lau, RR, Sigelman, L and Rovner, IB (2007) The effects of negative political campaigns: a meta-analytic reassessment. Journal of Politics 69(4), 1176–1209.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Leeper, TJ (2017) How does treatment self-selection affect inferences about political communication? Journal of Experimental Political Science 47(1), 21–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lupia, A (1994) Shortcuts versus encyclopedias: information and voting behavior in California insurance reform elections. American Political Science Review 88(01), 63–76.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Markowski, R and Tucker, JA (2017) Subjective vs. objective proximity in Poland: new directions for the empirical study of political representation. Studia Polityczne 45(3), 9–44.Google Scholar
Meguid, BM (2008) Party Competition Between Unequals: Strategies and Electoral Fortunes in Western Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Milazzo, C (2015) Getting it right when it counts: constituency marginality and voter perceptions of British parties’ policy positions. Journal of Elections Public Opinion & Parties 25(2), 111–136.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Munger, K, Egan, PJ, Nagler, J, Ronen, J and Tucker, J (2020), “Replication Data for: Political Knowledge and Misinformation in the Era of Social Media: Evidence from the 2015 U.K. Election”, https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/8PMMVT, Harvard Dataverse, V1, UNF:6:ioQl80Kjaoduzl5LRZv7Bg== [fileUNF]CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Petrocik, JR (1996) Issue ownership in presidential elections, with a 1980 case study. American Journal of Political Science 40(3), 825–850.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Prior, M (2007) Post-broadcast Democracy: How media Choice Increases Inequality in Political Involvement and Polarizes Elections. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Smith, A and Anderson, M (2018) Social media use in 2018. Pew Research Center, 1 March. Available from https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2018/03/01/social-media-use-in-2018/ (accessed 11 May 2020).Google Scholar
Vavreck, L (2009) The Message Matters: The Economy and Presidential Campaigns. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Whiteley, P et al. (2013) Affluence, Austerity and Electoral Change in Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Supplementary material: Link

Munger et al. Dataset

Dataset

https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/8PMMVT
Link
Supplementary material: PDF

Munger et al. supplementary material

Munger et al. supplementary material

Download Munger et al. supplementary material(PDF)
PDF 701.2 KB