Calendrier du 15 mai 2018
Paris Trade Seminar
Du 15/05/2018 de 14:30 à 16:00
PSE, 48 boulevard Jourdan, 75014 Paris - salle R2-21
DIX-CARNEIRO R. (Duke)
Trade and Informality in the Presence of Labor Market Frictions,
écrit avec P. Goldberg, C. Meghir and G. Ulyssea
Applied Economics Lunch Seminar
Du 15/05/2018 de 12:30 à 13:30
Salle R1-09, Campus Jourdan, 48 boulevard Jourdan, 75014 Paris
HENRY Emeric(Penn State University)
BARRERA Oscar()
ZHURAVSKAYA Ekaterina(PSE)
GURIEV Sergei(Science Po)
Facts, Alternative Facts, and Fact Checking in Times of Post-Truth Politics
How persuasive are “alternative facts,” i.e., misleading or outright false statements
by populist politicians, in convincing voters? How effective is fact checking in countervailing
the alternative facts? We conduct a randomized online experiment to address
these questions in the context of the 2017 French presidential election campaign.
Marine Le Pen (MLP), the extreme-right candidate who reached the runoff, regularly
used misleading arguments in support of her policy proposals, to which mainstream
media responded with systematic fact checking. We expose randomly selected subgroups
of a sample of 2480 voting-age French to quotes from MLP containing misleading
information about immigration and/or to facts from official sources. We find that
alternative facts are highly persuasive: voters exposed to MLP rhetoric move their
policy conclusions and voting intensions toward MLP. Fact checking does nothing to
undo these effects despite improving factual knowledge of voters. In contrast, without
fact-checking, exposure to MLP’s quotes moves posteriors on facts toward more
extreme views away from the truth. Being exposed only to official facts increases
political support for MLP while moving factual knowledge toward the truth.