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Fact checkers evaluate the truthfulness of political claims appearing in public. The practice has increased enormously in recent years. This review analyses research concerning political fact-checking; it presents what kind of studies have been made about fact-checking and introduces their main findings. Most of the literature focuses either on fact-checking as a profession or on its corrective potential. Research about the effectiveness of fact-checking offers mixed results: some find that fact-checking reduces misperceptions, others that corrections are often ineffective. It is also disputed whether fact checkers are consistent in their conclusions and whether their methods are reliable. Moreover, the literature is overwhelmingly focused in the US context.

Health and Political Engagement Social scientists have only recently begun to explore the link between health and political engagement. Understanding this relationship is vitally important from both a scholarly and a policy-making perspective. This book is the first to offer a comprehensive account of health and political engagement. Using both individual-level and country-level data drawn from the European Social Survey, World Values Survey and new Finnish survey data, it provides an extensive analysis of how health and political engagement are con nected. It measures the impact of various health factors on a wide range of forms of political engagement and attitudes and helps shed light on the mechanisms behind the interaction between health and political engagement. This text is of key interest scholars, students and policy-makers in health, politics, and democracy, and more broadly in the social and health and medical sciences.

This article explores two theoretical possibilities for why personal health may affect political trust: the psychological‐democratic contract theory, and the role of personal experience in opinion formation. It argues that citizens with health impairments are more likely to experience the direct effects of political decisions as they are more dependent on public health services. Negative subjective evaluations of public services can lower trust levels, especially if people's expectations are high. Using European Social Survey data, the association between health and trust in 19 Western European states is analysed. The results indicate that people in poor health exhibit lower levels of trust towards the political system than people in good health. The differences in trust between those in good and poor health are accentuated among citizens with left‐leaning ideological values. The results suggest that welfare issues may constitute a rare context in which personal, rather than collective, experiences affect opinion formation.

In search of a better understanding of inequalities in citizen political engagement, scholars have begun addressing the relationship between personal health and patterns of political behavior. This study focuses on the impact of personal health on various forms of political participation. The analysis contributes to existing knowledge by examining a number of different participation forms beyond just voting. Using European Social Survey data from 2012/2013 for Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden (N = 8,060), self-reported turnout and six alternative modes of political engagement were modeled as dependent variables. Contrary to expectations, poor health did not depress participation across all forms. As assumed by the increased activism hypothesis, all else equal, people with poor health were more active than their healthy counterparts in direct contacts with power holders and demonstrations. The results reveal a "reversed health gap" by showing that people with health problems are in fact more politically active than what previous research, which has focused on voting, has suggested. Although the magnitude of the gap should not be overdramatized, our results stress the importance of distinguishing between different forms of participation when analyzing the impact of health on political engagement. Nevertheless, the findings show that poor health can stimulate people into political engagement rather than depressing activity. This finding holds when the effects of several sociodemographic and motivational factors are controlled for.