Tailoring the Truth

Working Paper Matthias Diermeier Tailoring the Truth An experimental approach to parliamentarians’ toleration of misinformation and responsiveness in Germany 11th August 2021 Redaktion/ Wissenschaftliche Koordination Julia Rakers Tel. +49 (0) 203 / 379 – 1388 Sekretariat Lina-Marie Zirwes Tel. +49 (0) 203 / 379 - 2018 [email protected] Herausgeber (V.i.S.d.P.) Univ. Prof. Dr. Karl-RuDolf Korte Redaktionsanschrift Redaktion Regierungsforschung.De NRW School of Governance Institut für Politikwissenschaft Lotharstraße 53 47057 Duisburg [email protected] Please cite as Diermeier, Matthias (2021): Tailoring the Truth, An experimental approach to parliamentarians’ toleration of misinformation anD responsiveness in Germany, Working Paper, published on: regierungsforschung.De Tailoring the Truth An experimental approach to parliamentarians’ toleration of misinformation and responsiveness in Germany Von Matthias Diermeier1 Abstract The rise of populist radical right parties (PRRPs) is largely seen to have been triggered by a de- alignment between voters and political elites and to have triggered an increasing supply of misinformation. Consequently, the German populist radical right party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) is strongly associated with the notion that ‘faKe news’ endanger democracy (Reuter et al., 2019). Whereas most studies focus on ‘fake news’ dynamics in social media, this contribution analyses one-to-one communication between politicians and constituents in an experimental setting. For this purpose, all 2,503 German parliamentarians of the federal political system receive an artificial inquiry including a piece of misinformation that circulates among the different elec- torates. The experiment reveals a division in political communication between established parties and the AfD. Politicians of established parties seem to be intrinsically driven by the ideal of a good democratic representative. They significantly abstain from tolerating misinformation, are more responsive and their overall communication behaviour is much less strategic. What is more, AfD parliamentarians are seven times as eager to tolerate ‘fake news’ – a number that becomes even higher when facing an immigration related piece of misinformation circulating within the populist radical right’s electorate. Finally, the AfD’s communication behaviour reflects their intention to sow distrust in the German society, economy, and administration. 1 Matthias Diermeier is a trained economist who focuses on political economy. His research agenda centers on the economic drivers and societal divisions behind the rise of the populist radical right in Europe. He is the personal research assistant of the director at the German Economic Institute (IW) and a PhD candidate in Political Science at the NRW School of Governance, University of Duisburg-Essen. Matthias Diermeier is grateful for comments from Karl-Rudolf Korte and Max Schiffers. 1. Introduction It is the nature of political competition that different parties stress different aspects of the same political issue. The recent debate on ‘fake news’ and ‘factfulness’, however, has raised awareness for a structural manipulation of potential voters’ opinions (Pennycook et al., 2018). Hence, when analysing US politics “do facts matter?” is the fundamental question asked by Hochschild and Ein- stein (2015). Anti-establishment populist radical right parties (PRRPs) – who claim to be particularly responsive to ‘the people’ (Mudde, 2007) – have been accused of strategically disregarding facts, spreading misinformation, and triggering a polarization of the entire political system (Berg- mann, 2018; Castanho Silva, 2018; Runciman, 2018). These pieces of misinformation can contain complex conspiracy myths. However, ‘faKe news’ also include rather simple falsifiable statements such as White House press secretary Sean Spicer’s pretension that Donald Trump was received by the largest inauguration crowd in the history of the United States (The Guardian, 2017), Boris John- son’s famous Brexit campaign claim the UK would send 350 million Pound to the EU every week (Full Fact, 2017) or the German Alternative für Deutschland’s (AfD) exaggeration that the foreign- ers’ homicide rate in Germany had increased by 685 percent in 2018 (Tagesschau, 2019). Successful political campaigns manage to circumvent traditional gatekeepers by exploiting digital filter bub- bles: Particularly, the radical right has become a super-spreader of misinformation and tolerates ‘faKe news’ within their communities as it serves their political agenda (Allcott and GentzKow, 2017; Cantarella et al., 2019; Guess et al., 2020). Additionally, for Germany Knuth and Mayr conclude: “Like Trump, the AfD lives on the decay of certainty” (own translation, 2020). Although the ‘faKe news’ literature is limited to the semi-public digital world mostly focusing on social media, unfiltered political communication also involves direct one-to-one voter-politician communication. Recently, these discourses have been analysed in innovative responsiveness ex- periments based on constituent inquiries: In the US, senators were found to strategically tailor their answers on a controversial issue congruent with the stated constituents’ preferences – although without explicitly spreading ‘faKe news’ (Grose et al., 2015). Until today, this strand of literature leaves aside the special role, direct voter-politician communication plays for the radical right. Whereas PRRPs seem to be the driving force behind misinformation circulating in social media, it remains an open question whether the same is true for one-to-one communication between voters and politicians. The following analysis bridges this gap by carrying out a citizens’ inquiry experiment addressing the following research questions: Does PRRP politicians’ responsiveness stand out in one-to-one communication with constituents? Or is political communication, spreading and tolerating misinformation more generally related to party specific issue salience and positioning? The German political system represents a fruitful example for such a responsiveness misinformation communication experiment focussing on PRRP parliamentarians. On the one hand, in times of COVID-19 several German parliamentarians have stressed the importance of answering citizens’ inquiries remotely (Tagesspiegel, 2020). On the other hand, the far right AfD regularly claims to be particularly responsive and to represent ‘the true people’ (“wir sind das Volk”) (Geiges, 2018; Siri and Lewandowsky, 2019) while being criticized of spreading misinformation by its competitors and the media (br, 2020; mdr, 2019; ZeitOnline, 2019). What is more, 89 AfD parliamentarians on the national and 236 AfD parliamentarians on the state level represent a significant number of potential respondents. At the same time, the six large fac- tions present in the German parliament allow a gradual responsiveness analysis depending on the respective party’s positioning and issue salience. Particularly, the AfD’s cultural antagonist, the Green Party enables a viable comparison of political communication in constituent inquiries – with 67 parliamentarians on the national and 266 parliamentarians on the state level. The present analysis builds a bridge between the PRRP misinformation literature that solely focus- ses on social media and the experimental approaches that miss to zoom in on the populist radical right behaviour in answering citizens inquiries: A total population experiment of one-to-one citizens-parliamentarians communication of all 2.580 political representatives of a federal political system is carried out. The concept of ‘fake news’ is operationalized for the AfD’s and the Green Par- ties’ core issues – immigration and climate change – and a control topic based on misinformation that actually circulate within the electorate. Finally, the experiment fills a pressing gap in the literature by analysing the response behaviour in direct citizens-parliamentarians communication when being confronted with misinformation. The remainder of this paper is structured as follows. The following section gives an overview over the ‘faKe news’ and responsiveness debate in the context of the right-wing populist rise. A special focus is laid on experimental approaches to explore politicians’ communication behaviour and the mechanisms why misinformation would be spread or tolerated when being directly addressed by constituents. The third section explains the empirical strategy and the experimental design that is chosen to pursue the research question. The fourth section explains the results and carves out whether the AfD plays a special role in spreading misinformation and in the voter-politician responsiveness. A final section concludes with the most important findings. Important ethical considera- tions are summarised in Appendix 1. 2. Literature review 2.1 Tailoring the truth on the populist right: The German case It is a well-established finding that political competition contains more than simple differences in parties’ issue positioning. When political actors jocKey for power, language plays a fundamental role (Korte, 2002). Which political voices are heard, which topics can be introduced to the political arena (agenda setting) and how issues are framed is crucial for political power structures and finally for election outcomes (Klüser and Radojevic, 2016). Scholars have recently focused on the art of narrative storytelling in political competition:

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