Brendan Nyhan

New Upshot: Why vaccination laws matter most

From my new Upshot column:

Social media companies face increasing scrutiny for amplifying fringe anti-vaccine sentiment amid measles outbreaks in several states like Washington. In response, Facebook, YouTube and Pinterest recently made headlines by announcing initiatives to reduce vaccine misinformation on their platforms.

But the focus on anti-vaccine content on social media can obscure the most important factor in whether children get vaccinated: the rules in their home states, which are being revisited in legislative debates across the country that have received far less attention.

New Medium: A weak president can still be dangerous

From my new column at Medium:

Just as physicists spend decades seeking to resolve the seeming paradox that a photon is both a wave and a particle, observers of U.S. politics continue to struggle with the reality that Donald Trump is both an exceptionally weak president and an authoritarian threat. Since 2017, many commentators have treated this question as binary, suggesting that Trump’s failures as a president should invalidate any concerns over what his White House tenure might mean for the future of our democracy. But that’s an incorrect — and dangerous — assumption.

New Medium: A politician's authenticity doesn't matter

From my new Medium column:

With the 2020 presidential campaign officially underway, the worst excesses of political reporting are once again rearing their ugly heads — most notably, the media's preoccupation with candidates' authenticity, an obsession that has marred so many recent presidential campaigns. New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand became the latest victim of the authenticity police on Saturday, after she had the audacity to ask whether it was appropriate to use her fingers or a fork to eat the fried chicken she was served at a women's brunch in South Carolina.

New York's Frank Rich asked on Twitter, "Is there anything Gillibrand has done that is not contrived and opportunistic? I ask the question seriously. Replies welcome." New York Times columnist Frank Bruni went further, writing that "you got the sense that she would have grabbed that chicken with her pinkie toes if she'd been told to… Anything to conform. Anything to please."

The incident, just the latest entry in the growing pantheon of political food gaffes, reveals how the media too often covers presidential candidates on the trail. With most candidates' speeches and rallies generating relatively few headline-worthy sound bites, reporters and commentators often instead turn their focus to theater critic–style assessments of a candidate's strategy and campaign skills. In its most dangerous form, this form of coverage centers on manufactured narratives about a candidate's personality.

New Medium: Why fears of fake news are overhyped

From my new column:

After the shock of the 2016 presidential election, many Americans found psychological refuge in a simple explanation for why Donald Trump won: "fake news." False or misleading information published by dubious for-profit websites had spread widely on Facebook, reaching millions of people in the final months of the campaign. This development provided a tidy narrative that resonated with concerns about potential online echo chambers.

More than two years later, we can now evaluate these claims. And it turns out that many of the initial conclusions that observers reached about the scope of fake news consumption, and its effects on our politics, were exaggerated or incorrect. Relatively few people consumed this form of content directly during the 2016 campaign, and even fewer did so before the 2018 election. Fake news consumption is concentrated among a narrow subset of Americans with the most conservative news diets. And, most notably, no credible evidence exists that exposure to fake news changed the outcome of the 2016 election.

The fake news panic echoes fears that prior forms of communication would brainwash the public. Just as exaggerated accounts of hysteria over Orson Welles' War of the Worlds broadcast took advantage of doubts about radio, claims about the reach and influence of fake news express people's broader concerns about social media and the internet.

Many important concerns about online misinformation still remain, including the influence of the fake news audience, the difficulty of countering fake news at scale, the dangers of Facebook's size, and the threat of YouTube-based radicalization. But none of these questions can be adequately addressed without creating a reality-based debate that puts fake news in context as just one of the many sources of misinformation in our politics.

New report on fake news and misinformation in 2018

From my new report with Andy Guess, Ben Lyons, Jacob Montgomery, and Jason Reifler:

Concern has grown since the 2016 presidential election about the prevalence of misinformation in American politics and the ways social media has potentially exacerbated its reach and influence. In this report, we assess the quality and quantity of information flows during the 2018 midterm election campaign, focusing specifically on two new forms of media - "fake news" and political ads on Facebook. First, we examine visits to fake news websites. We find a substantial decline in the proportion of Americans who visited at least one fake news website in 2018 relative to 2016. However, evidence is mixed on changes in the average share of people's information diets that comes from fake news websites. Our data also reveal that exposure to political ads on Facebook was limited relative to other types of advertising and concentrated among a subset of targeted users who frequently use Facebook. Finally, we provide new evidence of how frequently Americans believe fake and hyperpartisan news as well as misperceptions promoted by elites that circulated on social media during the campaign.

New column: How technologists can counter misinfo

From my new column co-authored with Patrick Ball:

Since "fake news" rose to prominence during and after the 2016 election, the United States and countries around the world have struggled to determine how to most effectively address political misinformation. Though critics' worst fears about the influence of online misinformation are likely overstated, false or misleading political claims are being amplified by platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, deceiving voters and distorting public debate on an unprecedented scale.

As a result, these firms have faced increasing scrutiny from Congress and the media. However, calls for reform are increasingly coming not just from politics and journalism but from employees of the platforms themselves, the skilled computer engineers and managers who are Big Tech's most scarce – and thus most valuable – resource. For that reason, technologists could be a critical ally in the fight against online misinformation.

This article was published as part of Defusing Disinfo, a project of the Stand Up Republic Foundation.

New Bright Line Watch reports

We published two new reports today at Bright Line Watch:
-Wave 7 Report - new expert and public ratings of the state of U.S. democracy in October 2018
-Party, policy, democracy and candidate choice in U.S. elections - a new study estimating the effects of candidate support for democratic principles on vote choice

New Medium: The Trump backlash on immigration

From my new column:

Intweets and campaign rallies in recent days, President Trump has returned to his signature cause of immigration, inveighing against drug traffickers and a caravan of immigrants.

Trump’s strategy makes perfect sense politically. He hopes to prod the Republican base to turn out in the midterms in November. One of the most effective ways to motivate political action is to stoke fears among your supporters.

Strikingly, however, public opinion data suggest that Trump has failed to convince the public on immigration and has even helped to turn the public against his positions — an effect that may grow stronger as his anti-immigration campaign intensifies.

New Monkey Cage: Court legitimacy post-Kavanaugh

From my new Monkey Cage post on the potential consequences of Brett Kavanaugh's nomination for public attitudes toward the Supreme Court:

Could Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination undermine the public standing of the Supreme Court? Observers such as the Atlantic’s Ron Brownstein think so. “Every time [Chief Justice John] Roberts would lean on Kavanaugh to construct a majority,” Brownstein writes, “the chief justice could further erode the Court’s already eroding public confidence.”

In general, public support for the court tends to be relatively stable. But this time could be different. Increased ideological and partisan divisions and pressure from the #MeToo movement could dent the court’s image, especially since the coalition backing the prospective new justice has such narrow support.

Document Journal essay on information overload

My 2017 essay for Document Journal on information overload is now online:

Critics of democracy have long lamented that people know too little about politics, but today we have more news and information available to us than at any moment in history.

I, for instance, start and end my days with Twitter: The ongoing stream of information it provides about the world is a relentless and sometimes oppressive presence in my life. Even my less politically obsessed friends and family members now find that the news has become an ongoing part of their days via the Facebook posts, push alerts, and other manners information finds its way to the devices and screens that surround us.

They aren't unique. According to a study from Pew Research Center in July 2016, 38 percent of American adults say they often get their news online. In particular, more than seven in 10 people get some of this information on their mobile devices, which have brought the news into parts of our day to day lives where it used to be largely invisible. Similarly, nearly 60 percent of adults say they often or sometimes watch cable news, which increasingly permeates common spaces like airports and coffee shops, making the news harder to escape even if we do not seek it out.

At a personal level, these trends can be discomforting. Surveys sponsored by the American Psychological Association found that people who frequently check online information sources are especially stressed. Though it is impossible to separate cause and effect in these data, it is noteworthy that approximately four in 10 of those "constant checkers" cite political and cultural controversies as a specific cause of stress. Overall, 57 percent of Americans report that the political climate is very or somewhat stressful. What is understood even less is how this deluge of information is affecting our lives as citizens. Are we truly better informed? Or are we becoming a nation of political amnesiacs, stumbling blindly from one breaking news event and meme to the next?

New Bright Line Watch report on U.S. democracy

The key results from our July expert and public surveys:

• American democracy is continuing to erode. Our expert respondents perceive a consistent, ongoing decline in the overall quality of American democracy from 2015 (assessed retrospectively) to our first expert survey in February 2017 and over the five subsequent surveys we have conducted since then.
• Public ratings of the quality of American democracy are continuing to polarize. Notably, those who disapprove of Trump report ongoing democratic erosion. However, those who approve of the president perceive the quality of democracy to have improved measurably during this period.
• Across a range of measures, President Trump’s supporters and his detractors are drawing conclusions about democracy that are not merely disconnected, but are often antithetical to each other.
• A number of recent political events are characterized by experts as both highly abnormal and important.

Read the report for more, including some striking graphs.

New report: Debunking "echo chamber" hype

From a new Knight Foundation report co-authored with Andrew Guess, Benjamin Lyons, and Jason Reifler:

Is the expansion of media choice good for democracy? Not according to critics who decry "echo chambers," "filter bubbles," and "information cocoons" — the highly polarized, ideologically homogeneous forms of news and media consumption that are facilitated by technology. However, these claims overstate the prevalence and severity of these pa erns, which at most capture the experience of a minority of the public.

In this review essay, we summarize the most important findings of the academic literature about where and how Americans get news and information. We focus particular attention on how much consumers engage in selective exposure to media content that is consistent with their political beliefs and the extent to which this pattern is exacerbated by technology.

As we show, the data frequently contradict or at least complicate the "echo chambers" narrative, which has ironically been amplified and distorted in a kind of echo chamber effect.

We instead emphasize three fundamental features of preferences for news about politics. First, there is diversity in the sources and media outlets to which people pay attention. In particular, only a subset of Americans are devoted to a particular outlet or set of outlets; others have more diverse information diets. Second, though some people have high levels of motivation to follow the latest political news, many only pay attention to politics at critical moments, or hardly at all. Finally, the context in which we encounter information matters. Endorsements from friends on social media and algorithmic rankings can influence the information people consume, but these effects are more modest and contingent than many assume. Strikingly, our vulnerability to echo chambers may instead be greatest in offline social networks, where exposure to diverse views is often more rare.

New NYT: Persuasion effects of fake news overblown

From my new Upshot column:

How easy is it to change people’s votes in an election?

The answer, a growing number of studies conclude, is that most forms of political persuasion seem to have little effect at all.

This conclusion may sound jarring at a time when people are concerned about the effects of the false news articles that flooded Facebook and other online outlets during the 2016 election. Observers speculated that these so-called fake news articles swung the election to Donald J. Trump. Similar suggestions of large persuasion effects, supposedly pushing Mr. Trump to victory, have been made about online advertising from the firm Cambridge Analytica and content promoted by Russian bots.

Much more remains to be learned about the effects of these types of online activities, but people should not assume they had huge effects.

New research on fake news consumption in 2016

My new research on fake news consumption with Andrew Guess and Jason Reifler:

Selective Exposure to Misinformation: Evidence from the consumption of fake news during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign

Though some warnings about online “echo chambers” have been hyperbolic, tendencies toward selective exposure to politically congenial content are likely to extend to misinformation and to be exacerbated by social media platforms. We test this prediction using data on the factually dubious articles known as “fake news.” Using unique data combining survey responses with individual-level web traffic histories, we estimate that approximately 1 in 4 Americans visited a fake news website from October 7-November 14, 2016. Trump supporters visited the most fake news websites, which were overwhelmingly pro-Trump. However, fake news consumption was heavily concentrated among a small group — almost 6 in 10 visits to fake news websites came from the 10% of people with the most conservative online information diets. We also find that Facebook was a key vector of exposure to fake news and that fact-checks of fake news almost never reached its consumers.

Coverage in today's New York Times:

Fake news evolved from seedy internet sideshow to serious electoral threat so quickly that behavioral scientists had little time to answer basic questions about it, like who was reading what, how much real news they also consumed and whether targeted fact-checking efforts ever hit a target.

Sure, surveys abound, asking people what they remember reading. But these are only as precise as the respondents’ shifty recollections and subject to a malleable definition of “fake.” The term “fake news” itself has evolved into an all-purpose smear, used by politicians and the president to deride journalism they don’t like.

But now the first hard data on fake-news consumption has arrived. Researchers last week posted an analysis of the browsing histories of thousands of adults during the run-up to the 2016 election — a real-time picture of who viewed which fake stories, and what real news those people were seeing at the same time.

The reach of fake news was wide indeed, the study found, yet also shallow. One in four Americans saw at least one false story, but even the most eager fake-news readers — deeply conservative supporters of President Trump — consumed far more of the real kind, from newspaper and network websites and other digital sources.

"You're Fake News!" The Poynter Media Trust Survey

From a new report released yesterday (co-authored with Andy Guess and Jason Reifler):

During the Trump presidency, the United States has witnessed unprecedented attacks on the press from the highest office in the land. It is essential to understand how these attacks have affected attitudes toward the press. This report presents results of a public opinion and behavioral study designed to gauge the public’s support for the media in these difficult times. Encouragingly, we find that the public supports the press, albeit weakly. However, this result masks dramatic polarization in media attitudes. Specifically, we show that Republicans and Trump supporters have far more negative attitudes toward the press than Democrats and Trump opponents, especially among respondents with high levels of political knowledge. Republicans and Trump supporters are also far more likely to endorse extreme claims about media fabrication, to describe journalists as an enemy of the people, and to support restrictions on press freedom. These differences in media attitudes are reflected in polarized information diets on our behavioral measures, though to a lesser extent than people’s self-reports of the outlets they read suggest. Finally, we show that exposure to anti-media messages, including an attack by Trump on “fake news,” have relatively limited effects on attitudes toward the press.

New Monkey Cage: A new way to fight misinformation

From my new Monkey Cage post (co-authored with Yusaku Horiuchi):

State-sponsored propaganda like the recently unmasked @TEN_GOP Twitter account is of very real concern for our democracy. But we should not allow the debate over Russian interference to crowd out concerns about homegrown misinformation, which was vastly more prevalent during and after the 2016 election...

One promising approach [to countering misinformation] is summary fact-checking — an increasingly popular format that presents an overview of fact-checking ratings for a politician. This is distinct from focusing on whether a single statement is true or false; rather, it evaluates a group of such statements, assessing a speaker’s overall truthfulness and reliability as a source. Though the statements in question are of course not randomly chosen, the format may be an effective way to increase the costs of repeatedly making false statements.

One of us (Nyhan) investigated the effect of this format in three experimental studies conducted in 2016 and 2017 in collaboration with different undergraduate co-authors at Dartmouth.

New NYT: Facebook's fact-checking should be checked

From my new Upshot column:

Since the 2016 presidential campaign, Facebook has taken a number of actions to prevent the continued distribution of false news articles on its platform, most notably by labeling articles rated as false or misleading by fact checkers as “disputed.”

But how effective are these measures?

To date, Facebook has offered little information to the public other than a recent email to fact checkers asserting that labeled articles receive 80 percent fewer impressions. But more data is necessary to determine the success of these efforts. Research (including my own) suggests the need to carefully evaluate the effectiveness of Facebook’s interventions.

New Bright Line Watch survey results

The results of our third survey of the state of American democracy are out:

Given widespread concern about the possible erosion of democracy in the United States, Bright Line Watch has conducted expert surveys since early 2017 asking thousands of professional political scientists to identify the dimensions of democracy they see as most important and to rate how well the U.S. is performing on them. But does the public agree with those assessments?

...The public is quite concerned about the state of U.S. democracy, especially those who disapprove of President Trump. Americans’ ratings of democratic performance are often worse than those of experts, especially in the areas experts identify as the most important. In general, experts seem to have a less negative view of how well U.S. democracy is doing than the public.

From coverage by Ezra Klein at Vox:

In February 2017, four political scientists formed Bright Line Watch. Their mission was a chilling sign of the times, a reflection of the fears that swept across the United States as Donald Trump swept into office. They existed, they said, to “monitor the status of democratic practices and highlight potential threats to American democracy.” The danger was from our new president, and from ourselves...

Since the launch of Trump’s presidency, Bright Line Watch has conducted repeated surveys of political scientists on the state of American democracy. The third wave of results, which will be presented at a conference on threats to American democracy on Friday, contains good news of a sort: Trump’s presidency, at least in the view of these experts, has not done visible damage to the workings of the American political system.

New NYT: Why Puerto Rico misperceptions matter

From my new Upshot column (co-authored with Kyle Dropp):

More than three million Americans in Puerto Rico are struggling to meet basic needs after a devastating strike from Hurricane Maria, but their plight seems to be attracting far less public or political attention than the woes caused by the recent hurricanes in Texas and Florida.

One potential explanation is the congested news environment. Over the weekend, for instance, President Trump reignited a debate over whether N.F.L. players should kneel during the national anthem, crowding the hurricane out of the headlines.

The lack of functioning power and communications in Puerto Rico has also hindered reporting on the storm.

But another explanation is simpler: Many Americans don’t realize that what happened in Puerto Rico is a domestic disaster, not a foreign one.

New Politico Magazine: Why norms matter

From my new article in the ideas issue of Politico Magazine:

The calls for Donald Trump to release his tax returns began early during the campaign and never really let up. It was easy to assume he eventually would make good on his promises to turn them over. Every president since Jimmy Carter had released his taxes; Trump would have to do the same, right?

What we’ve learned since then, of course, is that Trump didn’t have to reveal anything. The Constitution doesn’t require disclosure; plenty of federal officials need to submit their tax returns to the Senate, but not the president. It’s just a norm.

One of the crucial lessons of the past year, turns out, is just how much of American politics is governed not by written law, but by norms like these.

New Vox interview on Trump's misinformation

I'm interviewed by Carlos Maza of Vox in this video about the difficulty of correcting Donald Trump's misinformation. Here's the text introduction:

President Donald Trump made roughly 500 false statements in the first 200 days of his presidency, according to the Toronto Star’s Daniel Dale. That’s an impressive amount of misinformation, and it’s turned news networks into full-time fact-checking organizations, with journalists frequently having to pause their regular programming to debunk Trump’s latest tweet or public statement.

But all that fact-checking hasn’t stopped many Trump supporters from believing misinformation to be true. Two-thirds of Republican voters still believe millions of people voted illegally during the election. A majority of Trump supporters think Obama spied on him during the campaign, and almost half still think Trump won the popular vote.

How is that possible? Why isn’t fact-checking enough to convince people to abandon inaccurate political beliefs?

Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist who’s spent years studying the effects of fact-checking, says the durability of those false beliefs isn’t unique to Trump supporters — it represents a basic problem with human psychology.

On the Media interview on the backfire effect

My new interview with Brooke Gladstone of On the Media about my new research into the effects of corrective information and the role of doubt in science (MP3):

Once people have a misconception about the news, it can be extremely difficult to make them change their minds – even in the face of hard evidence. Studies have even shown the existence of a “backfire effect,” whereby facts can make people double-down on their false ideas. As Brendan Nyhan, professor of government at Dartmouth College and one of the researchers behind the discovery of the backfire effect, explained to Brooke in 2009, “people were so successful at bringing to mind reasons the correction was wrong that they actually ended up being more convinced than the people who didn’t receive the correction.”

After new research, however, it seems that the backfire effect might not be as strong as once thought – giving hope to anyone invested in the pursuit of a more truthful world. Brooke speaks with Nyhan again about the significance of this new finding and the role of doubt in moving science forward.

Trumpcast interview on the President's dishonesty

My new interview with Virginia Heffernan on Slate's Trumpcast (MP3):

Virginia Heffernan talks to Brendan Nyhan, a professor of government at Dartmouth, about the president’s many lies, including those in the New York Times interview with Maggie Haberman, Peter Baker, and Michael S. Schmidt.

New NYT: Is Trump's base support exaggerated?

From my new Upshot column:

Donald J. Trump’s approval ratings are the lowest at this stage of a presidency since modern polling began in the mid-20th century. But his party’s base still appears highly supportive, which has discouraged Republicans in Congress from abandoning the president and his legislative agenda.

Even the most recent Russia revelations seemingly haven’t dented support for Mr. Trump among Republicans, who continue to approve of his job performance at very high rates — 82 percent in an ABC News/Washington Post poll released Sunday, for instance.

But numbers like these may mask a decline in support for Mr. Trump among his original party base.

New Bright Line Watch survey results

At Bright Line Watch, we have released the results of our second expert survey on the state of American democracy. Here is coverage at The Upshot by Claire Cain Miller and Kevin Quealy (where I am a contributor):

American democracy remains healthy, but its health has worsened for the first time in recent history, according to a new survey of 1,126 political scientists.

Three-quarters of respondents said the quality of United States democracy had declined in the last two years, after four decades of stability. Twenty-one percent said there had been no change, and 4 percent said it was healthier.

The survey was the second by Bright Line Watch, a group formed by academics after the presidential election to study democratic performance in the United States over time. Compared with the first survey, conducted in February, a month into Donald J. Trump’s presidency, they said the country was doing worse on a few core democratic principles.

For more, see the Bright Line Watch website.

NHPR interview on liberal conspiracy theories

My new interview with New Hampshire Public Radio's Rick Ganley about the spread of liberal conspiracy theories during the Trump administration (MP3):

Many of these conspiracy theories or fake news stories have to do with Trump and his campaign’s connections to Russia. What are you seeing?

"I’m seeing a disturbing trend of people taking the very serious and real questions about Russian interference and using that as a pretext for all sorts of wild and unsupported conspiracy theories. These are often coming from internet personalities and people who work on social media, but they’re infiltrating into the discourse more generally through liberal elites who are amplifying them. So we’re seeing a spread of these claims out into the mainstream in a way that I think is potentially worrisome."

See also my article for The Upshot and Zack Beauchamp's piece for Vox on this issue.

New NYT: How marching for science risks politicizing it

From my new Upshot column:

Before the recent March for Science, scholars and journalists debated the likely effect of the protest: Would it defend science against politicization or unnecessarily polarize the public on the value of the scientific enterprise?

Some early evidence suggests the march may have widened the divide among liberals and conservatives in their views of scientists but not, crucially, toward the research they conduct.

VPR interview on democratic norms after first 100 days

My new interview with Vermont Public Radio's Mitch Wertlieb on the state of democratic norms in the United States (MP3):

Have your concerns about an erosion of political norms been eased, or have they increased?

“I would say there's good news and bad news. Certainly some of the most extreme fears haven't been realized, and that's of course welcome.

“But I think in some ways those fears have been caricatured. There was a whole Wall Street Journal editorial that basically said, ‘Trump isn’t Hitler, therefore everyone's worries about him are invalid.’

“And I think that's both the wrong comparison, and we're at far too early a stage to draw any final conclusions about where we are or what damage may be done.”

See also my prior interviews with Wertlieb in December and January on this topic.

New CNN: Conspiracy theories transcend political party

A segment in which I'm interviewed from CNN's The Lead with Jake Tapper:

New NYT: Why false claims continue to be believed

From my new Upshot column (co-authored with Amanda Taub):

“Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts,” goes the saying — one that now seems like a relic of simpler times.

Today, President Trump is sticking with his own facts — his claim that the Obama administration wiretapped him during the election — in the face of testimony to the contrary by the F.B.I. director, James Comey...

Mr. Trump’s claims may appear to his opponents to have been embarrassingly debunked. But social science research suggests that Mr. Trump’s alternative version of reality may appeal to his supporters.

Partisan polarization is now so extreme in the United States that it affects the way that people consume and understand information — the facts they believe, and what events they think are important. The wiretapping allegations could well become part of a partisan narrative that is too powerful to be dispelled.

Bright Line Watch expert survey on U.S. democracy

The Bright Line Watch initiative that I am co-organizing with John Carey (Dartmouth), Gretchen Helmke (Rochester), and Susan Stokes (Yale) has released its first expert survey results on the state of American democracy:

Despite an atmosphere of pessimism or panic among many observers and public intellectuals, the political science community holds a rather nuanced view of democratic governance in the United States as of February 2017. They rate the U.S. as performing well on many of the criteria that they say are most important for democracy. For instance, 86% say the United States fully or mostly meets the standard that elections are free and fair and approximately 80% say the same for the standards of protecting free speech and the judiciary limiting executive power.

The results, however, also provide significant reason for concern. Fewer than two-thirds (66%) are as confident that journalists can operate unimpeded by the state, that the elected branches respect judicial independence (65%), or that government agencies are not used to monitor and harass political opponents (60%). Only the barest majorities are confident that Congress can effectively check the executive or that executive authority can be constrained within constitutional limits (52% and 51%, respectively).

For more, see coverage at The Upshot and our mission statement on the Bright Line Watch website.

New NYT: Why Dems are embracing conspiracy theories

From my new Upshot column:

Even as Democrats decry the false claims streaming regularly from the White House, they appear to have become more vulnerable to unsupported claims and conspiracy theories that flatter their own political prejudices. The reason isn’t just that a Republican now occupies the White House. Political psychology research suggests that losing political control can make people more vulnerable to misinformation and conspiracy theories.

New NYT: The Obamacare/ACA confusion

From my new Upshot column (co-authored with Kyle Dropp):

A sizable minority of Americans don’t understand that Obamacare is just another name for the Affordable Care Act.

These findings, from a poll by Morning Consult, illustrate the extent of public confusion over a health law that President Trump and Republicans in Congress hope to repeal.

New NYT: The GOP's incentive to stick with Trump

From my new Upshot column (co-authored with Kyle Dropp):

Despite the growing protests against President Trump’s executive action on refugees and other people from seven predominantly Muslim countries, relatively few members of his party have spoken out against the policy — a familiar pattern since the election. To date, no congressional Republicans have consistently resisted Mr. Trump or his agenda even though his approval ratings are already historically low for a new president.

Although some Republicans may fear a voter backlash in the midterm election, the greatest threat to re-election for most G.O.P. members of Congress is still a primary challenge. That’s what many legislators probably fear they will get if they oppose Mr. Trump, who is viewed overwhelmingly favorably among their partisan base, according to polling data.

VPR interview on Trump damaging democratic norms

My new interview with Vermont Public Radio's Mitch Wertlieb (MP3):

Donald J. Trump will be sworn in as the 45th president of the United States on Friday. A Dartmouth professor has been arguing that Trump's candidacy and presidential campaign have steadily eroded the political norms that provide a solid foundation for American democracy.

Prior to the inauguration, VPR checked in with Brendan Nyhan, a professor in the department of government at Dartmouth College, to get his take on the transition period before Donald Trump officially takes office.

See also my prior interview with Wertlieb on the same topic (MP3).

The state of American democracy

My Inauguration Day Twitter essay: The state of American democracy

New NYT: How Trump news overload smothers scandal

From my new Upshot column:

The bar for scandal in the Trump administration keeps being raised.

Every week brings potentially damaging developments that in other contexts could have generated weekslong controversies. With so many competing stories, however, they are frequently ignored or forgotten.

As a result, even negative coverage can sometimes benefit President-elect Donald J. Trump by displacing potentially more damaging stories from the news agenda.

New ProPublica/VPR interviews on democratic norms

My interview with Eric Umansky on the Pro Publica podcast:

See also my interview with Mitch Wertlieb on Vermont Public Radio, which can't be embedded directly (MP3).

New Primary Concerns podcast interview

My interview with Brian Beutler of The New Republic on his Primary Concerns podcast:

New Atlantic Q&A on eroding democratic norms

An interview with Clare Foran of The Atlantic inspired by my recent tweetstorm:

I think people are making the mistake of thinking that there will be a dramatic moment when they should speak out. Growing tolerance for conflicts of interest in government, limitations on media access and accountability, and harsh treatment of minority groups can accumulate. Similarly, the slow disappearance of various norms can damage our democracy when we’re not paying attention. Hopefully the worst-case scenario never happens—no one is saying the U.S. government is disappearing overnight—but each norm that falls is one fewer safeguard against executive overreach than we had before. Even if we never become an authoritarian state, our governance will suffer as a result.

New NYT: How Trump could reshape the party system

From my new Upshot column:

Donald J. Trump’s victory could well push the American party system toward a clash between an overwhelmingly white ethnic party and a cosmopolitan coalition of minority groups and college-educated whites.

Despite the unexpected result, Mr. Trump lost the popular vote in an election that in some respects closely resembled Barack Obama’s victory over Mitt Romney in 2012 — an ordinary end to a very abnormal campaign. The power of party identification held approximately 90 percent of Republicans in Mr. Trump’s camp.

However, Mr. Trump’s campaign may set in motion a process that reorients American politics toward the cosmopolitanism versus nationalism divide that he emphasized, reconfiguring our party system and shaping our politics for decades to come. The power of social identity suggests that such a dynamic could be difficult to stop once set in motion.

New NYT: Fact-checking can change views

From my new Upshot column:

A lot of time and effort has been spent correcting the falsehoods, lies, rumors and conspiracy theories promoted by politicians during this election — most notably by Donald J. Trump. Does it do any good? Or have we entered a “post-fact” age?

In some cases, research I have conducted with the political scientist Jason Reifler has found that correcting people’s false beliefs can be ineffective or, worse, make them cling to their views even more strongly.

However, other research we have done suggests that fact-checking can be effective. The political scientists Thomas Wood and Ethan Porter have also found corrective information is generally effective in reducing false beliefs, though the extent to which it is effective can depend on people’s political views.

The four of us decided to evaluate the effectiveness of corrective information in reducing misperceptions during this election.

New NYT: Voters not outraged over FBI disclosure

From my new Upshot column (co-authored with Kyle Dropp):

Hillary Clinton and President Obama are outraged about the F.B.I. director James Comey’s decision to disclose further inquiries into her handling of confidential email, but are the American people?

Although numerous prosecutors and former Department of Justice officials have accused Mr. Comey of violating formal guidelines and informal norms against commenting on continuing investigations or publicizing political cases just before elections, voters do not seem to share their indignation.

New NYT: Birtherism diminished but far from dead

From my new Upshot column (co-authored with Kyle Dropp):

America’s most prominent birther has finally disavowed the myth he helped to create. Will Donald J. Trump’s concession affect the public’s belief about whether President Obama was born in the United States?

Results from a new Morning Consult poll of registered voters suggest that fewer Americans now believe that President Obama was born outside the country — the false claim that Mr. Trump renounced last Friday — although birtherism continues to linger among a subset of the public.

New NYT: The effects of gaffes and health concerns

From my new Upshot column:

Hillary Clinton undoubtedly had a tough weekend, but how much will it affect the election?

On Friday night, Mrs. Clinton said half of Donald J. Trump’s supporters belonged in “the basket of deplorables” — “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic.” Survey data suggests that a substantial fraction of Mr. Trump’s supporters do hold deeply negative views of several demographic groups, but after heavy criticism she said, “I regret saying ‘half’ — that was wrong.”

Then on Sunday, Mrs. Clinton staggered in public. Following hours of uncertainty, her campaign disclosed that she had previously been diagnosed with pneumonia, prompting renewed questions about her health and her secretive tendencies.

Both episodes are receiving extensive news media coverage, but past experience shows that what many consider to be gaffes typically have very limited effects on the actual vote. Candidate health issues, however, could be more unpredictable.

New NYT: The paradox of echo chambers

From my new Upshot column:

Anyone who has followed this election carefully would be forgiven for thinking that voters have diverged into two separate realities. But it’s too soon to declare that we have entered a “post-fact” apocalypse, especially when we consider where people get information about politics.

New research shows that the great majority of people learn about political news from mainstream, relatively centrist media sources, not ideological websites or cable channels. However, relatively small numbers of partisans, especially Republicans, are heavy consumers of a highly polarized media diet.

This dynamic helps explain why there is so much concern about “echo chambers,” even though most people don’t confine themselves to one.

New NYT: The problem with Trump's "rigged" claim

From my new Upshot column:

As public support turns against him, Donald Trump is suggesting without evidence that the election could be “rigged” by Democrats using vote fraud. This claim threatens the norms of American elections and could provoke a damaging reaction among his supporters.

Ultimately, democracies depend on losers’ acceptance of the legitimacy of the political process. That’s why the norm of accepting election outcomes among defeated presidential candidates is so important.

New Monkey Cage: The "missing 28 pages" won't help

From a new Monkey Cage post co-authored with my former students Sasha Dudding and Heather Szilagyi:

Last month, the House Intelligence Committee released a previously classified section of the 2002 congressional inquiry into the September 11 attacks known as the missing “28 pages.” The U.S. government allegedly kept this document confidential to protect its relationship with Saudi Arabia. Instead, the move ended up fueling a massive controversy centered on claims of a cover-up by the U.S. government intended to suppress evidence of Saudi complicity in the 9/11 attacks.

Our research helps explain why withholding information from government documents like the “28 pages” is so often counterproductive. In a new article (written with co-authors at Dartmouth College) in the Journal of Experimental Political Science, we show how the use of redactions can undermine the effectiveness of documents intended to reduce belief in conspiracy theories. Keeping information from the public can create the perception of a cover-up even when none exists.

Our post is based on our new article in the Journal of Experimental Political Science (ungated), which was co-authored with the students in my 2014 Experiments in Politics seminar:

Classified or Coverup? The Effect of Redactions on Conspiracy Theory Beliefs

Brendan Nyhan, Franklin Dickinson, Sasha Dudding, Enxhi Dylgjeri, Eric Neiley, Christopher Pullerits, Minae Seog, Andy Simpson, Heather Szilagyi and Colin Walmsley

Conspiracy theories are prevalent among the public. Governments frequently release official documents attempting to explain events that inspire these beliefs. However, these documents are often heavily redacted, a practice that lay epistemic theory suggests might be interpreted as evidence for a conspiracy. To investigate this possibility, we tested the effect of redactions on beliefs in a well-known conspiracy theory. Results from two preregistered experiments indicate that conspiracy beliefs were higher when people were exposed to seemingly redacted documents compared to when they were exposed to unredacted documents that were otherwise identical. In addition, unredacted documents consistently lowered conspiracy beliefs relative to controls while redacted documents had reduced or null effects, suggesting that lay epistemic interpretations of the redactions undermined the effect of information in the documents. Our findings, which do not vary by conspiracy predispositions, suggest policymakers should be more transparent when releasing documents to refute misinformation.

New NYT: Trump's strategy on crime

From my new Upshot column:

In declaring himself "the law and order candidate" in his convention speech Thursday night, Donald Trump officially made crime one of his core issues. This emphasis is relatively new, and it's strategic.

New NYT: The Clinton case in context

From my new Upshot column:

The F.B.I. recommendation on Tuesday not to file charges against Hillary Clinton for what the director James Comey called her “extremely careless” email practices has set off a debate over whether there was any partisan influence in the case.

The issue came to the fore last week when news broke that former President Bill Clinton had boarded Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s plane. Though both sides insisted they had not discussed the case against Mrs. Clinton, the resulting furor prompted Ms. Lynch to vow to accept the recommendation of career prosecutors and the F.B.I. on whether to file charges.

In his announcement of the recommendation, which is likely to be endorsed by prosecutors at the Department of Justice, Mr. Comey said that the investigation had not been subject to outside influence.

Mr. Comey’s claim carries credibility given his status as a Republican who served in the George W. Bush administration. The case was also extraordinary in its level of importance and scrutiny — which may have created pressure to avoid any appearance of affecting the November election — and may not fit previous patterns. However, the historical record suggests that politically sensitive cases are often not immune from politics, especially in the timing of when they are resolved.