Fact-checking, reputation, and political falsehoods in Italy and the United States

Abstract

This article develops a reputational theory of political falsehoods. Politicians are motivated by the desire to build a positive reputation, therefore, they will be more likely to deliver false statements (incurring the risk of being fact-checked) when the potential benefit outweighs the cost. This happens as new elections come closer, since the electoral benefit of falsehoods increases along with the probability of being checked too late (after the election day). Politicians are less likely to issue falsehoods in detailed statements and in scripted communication, since the reputational cost is higher because such falsehoods would be considered intentional. Conversely, the stronger trust that voters attribute to politicians on issues they own, allows politicians to lie on such topics. Statistical analysis of almost 8000 statements released by politicians and assessed by fact-checkers, in the United States and Italy (2007–2018), supports the hypotheses. The results hold irrespective of party affiliation.

How do parties react to defections? Electoral strategies after a valence loss

“…Core Issues (ranging from 0 to 74, theoretical maximum: 100; mean: 27.3 sd: 13.5) accounts for the share of manifesto sentences belonging to the categories associated with the central issues of each party (on which they are seen as competent on: Green, 2011). Taking our cue from recent studies on the related concept of issue ownership (Ceron & Carrara, 2021; Schwarzbözl et al., 2020; Wagner & Meyer, 2014), per each party we derived the list of its core issues based on the attributes of its party family; for the so‐called ‘Special Issue’ parties, we individually assigned to each party the core issues that seemed more crucial for it. Previous studies suggest that issue ownership is quite stable over time and across countries, being a general and long‐term rather than a local and short‐term phenomenon (Seeberg, 2017).…”

Los fact-checkers españoles: rutinas y competencias contra la desinformación

“…Su exploración ha sido abordada desde diversas perspectivas, entre las que se incluyen la conceptualización de las fake news (Brennen et al, 2020;Baptista & Gradim, 2022), el análisis de la estructura de las noticias falsas (Salaverría et al, 2020;Tandoc et al, 2021;López-Martín et al, 2023), la investigación sobre su propagación (Hollowood & Mostrous, 2020;Salaverría et al, 2020;Raponi et al, 2022), así como la incidencia de factores psicológicos en la credibilidad de estos contenidos (Kappes et al, 2020;Batailler et al, 2022). Es particularmente destacable que, durante el último trienio, se ha observado un énfasis especial en los estudios relacionados con el fact-checking (García-Marín & Salvat-Martinrey, 2022;Ceron & Carrara, 2023;García-Marín et al, 2023).…”