Making them pay: Using the norm of honesty to generate costs for political lies

Recent literature finds that, although lies politicians spread to achieve partisan goals can be corrected, politicians who spread misinformation rarely pay a price for lying. We argue that the cost of lying should be greater when the norm of honesty is salient. Using three survey experiments that fe...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inElectoral studies Vol. 69; p. 102250
Main Authors Croco, Sarah E., McDonald, Jared, Turitto, Candace
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Kidlington Elsevier Ltd 01.02.2021
Elsevier Science Ltd
Subjects
Citizens
Costs
Electoral accountability
Experiments
Fictitious
Honesty
Legislatures
Lying
Misinformation
Norms
Partisanship
Politicians
Public opinion
Truth
Public opinion
Electoral accountability
Misinformation
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Summary:Recent literature finds that, although lies politicians spread to achieve partisan goals can be corrected, politicians who spread misinformation rarely pay a price for lying. We argue that the cost of lying should be greater when the norm of honesty is salient. Using three survey experiments that feature both a well-known politician (Donald Trump) and a fictitious member of Congress, we examine the cost politicians pay when they are caught in a lie. We find that many citizens, regardless of partisanship, will recognize a lie when one has been told. And although citizens punish unknown politicians for lying, they do not punish Trump similarly unless the norm of honesty is made salient. This effect, however, is limited to the narrower measure of situational approval; individual lies do not affect overall measures of job approval regardless of honesty salience. These results demonstrate the difficulty of getting citizens to update their views on well-known politicians, even when those politicians are caught in an obvious lie. Yet our findings suggest fruitful paths toward creating a disincentive for politicians to distort the truth.
ISSN:0261-3794
1873-6890
DOI:10.1016/j.electstud.2020.102250