Citizens as Complicits: Distrust in Politicians and Biased Social Dissemination of Political Information

Abstract

Widespread distrust in politicians is often attributed to the way elites portray politics to citizens: the media, competing candidates, and foreign governments are largely considered responsible for portraying politicians as self-interested actors pursuing personal electoral and economic interests. This article turns to the mass level and considers the active role of citizens in disseminating such information. We build on psychological research on human cooperation, holding that people exhibit an interpersonal transmission bias in favor of information on the self-interested, antisocial behavior of others to maintain group cooperation. We posit that this transmission bias extends to politics, causing citizens to disproportionally disseminate information on self-interested politicians through interpersonal communication and, in turn, contributes to distrust in politicians and policy disapproval. We support these predictions using novel experimental studies, allowing us to observe transmission rates and opinion effects in actual communication chains. The findings have implications for understanding and accommodating political distrust.

Partisan Influence in Suspicious Times

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Multiparty Activism in Uganda: The Experience of National Resistance Movement and National Unity Platform

“…In this regard, a political party provides a platform for its members to articulate their political issues. In turn, they are expected to adhere to the beliefs, values, and norms of their party as their cardinal role to develop and maintain group solidarity (Boggild et al, 2021). That aside, General Incentives Theory further maintains that emotional political party attachment contributes to the building of party activism among political party members (Bohm, 2015).…”

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“…Secondly, a variety of literatures show that information about the motives of other agents is important in impression formation processes. This type of information is more likely to be selected by participants in media choice experiments and better remembered over time (Bøggild, Aarøe and Petersen 2020;Iyengar, Norpoth and Hahn 2004). Likewise, beliefs about decision makers' motives influence evaluations of both the decision maker and the decision itself (Bøggild 2016;Hibbing and Alford 2004).…”