Does Fake News Affect Voting Behaviour?

Abstract

Over the last decade, the erosion of trust in public institutions and traditional media sources have been proceeding in parallel. As recent developments in media consumption have led to a proliferation of politically charged online misinformation, it is no wonder that many have been questioning whether the spread of fake news has affected the results of recent elections, contributing to the growth of populist party platforms. In this work, we aim to quantify this impact by focusing on the causal effect of the spread of misinformation over electoral outcomes in the 2018 Italian General elections. We exploit the presence of Italian and German linguistic groups in the Trento and Bolzano/Bozen autonomous provinces as an exogenous source of variation, assigning individuals into distinct filter bubbles each differently exposed to misinformation. To do so, we introduce a novel index based on text mining techniques to measure populism. Using this approach, we analyse the social media content of each party and their leaders over the course of the electoral campaign for the 2013 and 2018 elections. We then collect electoral and socio-demographic data from the region and, after constructing a proxy for exposition to misinformation, we measure the change in populist vote across the two groups in-between the two general elections, using a combination of difference-in-difference and two-stageleast-squares inference methods. Our results indicate that misinformation had a negligible and non-significant effect on populist vote in Trentino and South Tyrol during the Italian 2018 general elections.

The Political Legacy of Entertainment TV

“…As we reduce the bandwidth, exposed and non-exposed municipalities are indistinguishable in terms of all (observable) characteristics and previous voting behavior. 23 Even within this 23 The balance tests are reported in online Appendix Tables A4 and A5. smaller subsample, the coefficient of Signal remains positive and statistically significant; indeed, it is virtually identical to the baseline ordinary least squares (OLS) estimate on the total sample.…”

Investigating Italian disinformation spreading on Twitter in the context of 2019 European elections

“…In the observation period, the disinformation agenda was well settled on main arguments supported by leading parties, namely "Lega" and "Movimento 5 Stelle", since 2018 general elections; this suggests that they might have profited from and directly exploited hoaxes and misleading reports as to support their populist and nationalist views (whereas "Partito Democratico" appeared among main targets of misinformation campaigns); empirical evidence for this phenomenon has been also widely reported elsewhere [20,22]. However, the electoral outcome confirmed the decreasing trend of "Movimento 5 Stelle" electoral consensus in favor of "Lega", which was rewarded with an unprecedented success.…”

“…This result was later substantiated in a report of the Italian Authority for Communications Guarantees (AGCOM) [21]. A contemporary work [22] has collected electoral and socio-demographic data, relative to Trentino and South Tyrol regions, as to directly estimate the impact of fake news on the 2018 electoral outcomes, with a focus on the populist vote; this study argues that malicious information had a negligible and non-significant effect on the vote. Furthermore, a recent investigation by Avaaz [23] revealed the existence of a network of Facebook pages and fake accounts which spread low-credibility and inflammatory content-reaching over a million interactions-in explicit support of "Lega", "Movimento 5 Stelle" and controversial themes of debate such as immigration, national safety and anti-establishment.…”

Perceptions of the state of health services and the Brexit vote

“…However, we do not overlook the fact that many people carry their own biases, as shown for instance by party affiliates being more tolerant toward the corruption practices of their own party (Anduiza, Gallego & Muñoz, 2013). Nor do we ignore that people are often resistant to change and may choose to expose themselves to those information channels that, by being in tune with their stereotypes and preconceived ideas, reinforce their perceptions (Cantarella, Fraccaroli & Volpe, 2019;Jermias, 2001;Jonas, Schulz-Hardt, Frey & Thelen, 2001). Regardless of whether it is one way or another, perceptions of the world may matter as much as the real world itself: whether people decide to join or not a protest movement can be partially attributed to political entrepreneurs who construct and channel certain emotions such as fear and joy (Jasper, 2011), and how people perceive the consequences of globalization help us explain the vote for populist parties in Europe.…”