Not the Whole Story: From Punditry to Partisan Processing on the Power of the Truth Test

Abstract

This paper examines voters’ perceptions of political rhetoric. We begin by showing that partisanship shapes assessments of campaign rhetoric, a finding that continues to emerge in our data even as other recently published research has raised questions about the role partisanship plays when citizens distinguish between acceptable and objectionable campaign advertising. We now have evidence from three presidential elections showing that the motivated reasoning of partisans is the strongest and most consistent influence on their perceptions of fairness, a key factor in such evaluations. We next examine the impact that “fact checking” may have on voter perceptions of the fairness of campaign advertising claims. The results of question-wording experiments indicate a strong association between perceptions of truth and assessments of fairness. We find that factually inaccurate criticism tends to be regarded as most unfair regardless of partisanship, although partisan bias is often reduced rather than eliminated. Partisanship returns more strongly as a moderator of perceptions when ad claims are regarded as “not the whole story” or of questionable relevance. As with the more serious falsehoods that we tested, criticisms that we characterized as incomplete or irrelevant were generally more likely to be characterized as “unfair” by our respondents, but partisans nevertheless found the “misleading” or “irrelevant” labels offered more latitude than utterly false claims for explaining away what otherwise seemed to be a transgression against their principles of fairness than did claims of utter falsehood. Our work contributes to the growing literature on motivated reasoning by showing the influence of hot cognition in assessments of political advertising, offering a window into the processes of motivated reasoning as it may occur under conditions that replicate the real world of politics.