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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 September 2020

TROELS BØGGILD Open the ORCID record for TROELS BØGGILD [Opens in a new window] ,
LENE AARØE Open the ORCID record for LENE AARØE [Opens in a new window]  and
MICHAEL BANG PETERSEN Open the ORCID record for MICHAEL BANG PETERSEN [Opens in a new window]
TROELS BØGGILD*
Affiliation:
Aarhus University
LENE AARØE*
Affiliation:
Aarhus University
MICHAEL BANG PETERSEN*
Affiliation:
Aarhus University
*
Troels Bøggild, Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, Aarhus University, tboeggild@ps.au.dk.
Lene Aarøe, Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, Aarhus University, LeneAaroe@ps.au.dk.
Michael Bang Petersen, Professor, Department of Political Science, Aarhus University, michael@ps.au.dk.
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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.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 115 , Issue 1 , February 2021 , pp. 269 - 285
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Political Science Association

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Footnotes

The authors want to thank the following people for helpful comments and advice: Kim S½nderskov, Claes de Vreese, Rasmus Tue Pedersen, Lasse Laustsen, Peter DeScioli, Regula Hðnggli, Hugo Mercier, members of the section on Political Behavior and Institutions at the Department of Political Science, Aarhus University, participants at the New Ideas in Evolution and Social Cognition seminar, DÕpartement d’Õtudes cognitives, ècole Normale SupÕrieure, and participants at the Behaviour Seminar, Paris School of Economics. We also want to thank Ingo Rohlfing and three anonymous reviewers. Replication files are available at the American Political Science Review Dataverse: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/19FLXV.

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