Misinformation and the Currency of Democratic Citizenship
2000/08/01 by James H. Kuklinski, Paul J. Quirk, Jennifer Jerit +2 · 1 voice · 1,185 citations
Business, Management and Accounting · Psychology · Social Sciences · #Citizenship #Computer science #Democracy #Electoral Systems and Political Participation #Elite #Epistemology #Framing (construction) #Heuristics #Law #Media Influence and Politics #Misinformation #Obstacle #Persuasion #Phenomenon #Political Influence and Corporate Strategies #Political science #Politics #Psychology #Public relations #Referendum #Social psychology
paper · doi:10.1111/0022-3816.00033
published in The Journal of Politics 62(3), 790-816 (University of Chicago Press)
openalex publication_date 2000/08/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/06
Abstract
Scholars have documented the deficiencies in political knowledge among American citizens. Another problem, misinformation, has received less attention. People are misinformed when they confidently hold wrong beliefs. We present evidence of misinformation about welfare and show that this misinformation acts as an obstacle to educating the public with correct facts. Moreover, wide-spread misinformation can lead to collective preferences that are far different from those that would exist if people were correctly informed. The misinformation phenomenon has implications for two currently influential scholarly literatures: the study of political heuristics and the study of elite persuasion and issue framing.
Cited by
- Self-Fulfilling Misperceptions of Public Polarization
- Politically Knowledgeable or Directional (Mis)Believers? How to Identify Those Who Are correct About Political Facts for the “Wrong” Reasons
- Personal or Impersonal Evaluations? Political Sophistication and Citizen Conceptions of the Democratic Process
- Can Deliberative Minipublics Address the Cognitive Challenges of Democratic Citizenship?
- Emergent numeracy: How the crowd wisdom of non-rounding survey respondents generates accurate immigration estimates
- From “the Moon Is Rounder Abroad” to “Bravo, My Country”: How China Misperceives the World
- Expressive Responding and Belief in 2020 Election Fraud
- Fact‐checking election‐campaign misinformation: Impacts on noncommitted voters' feelings and behavior
- Does Political Information Matter? An Experimental Test Relating to Party Positions on Europe
- Mini-publics and Public Opinion: Two Survey-Based Experiments
- Partisan Expressive Responding: Lessons from Two Decades of Research
- The Prevalence and Correlates of Residential School Denialism in Canada
- Beyond innumeracy: measuring public misperceptions about immigration
- Expressive Responding and the Economy: The Case of Trump’s Return to Office
- Misinformation, Narratives, and Intergroup Attitudes: Evidence from India
- ‘The Economy is Rigged’: Inequality Narratives, Fairness, and Support for Redistribution in Six Countries
- Not a Bioweapon, or is it? The Role of Perceived Threats and Media Use in COVID-19 Misperceptions
- Confidently Wrong: Benefit Overuse Beliefs and Deservingness Among Adolescents
- Affluence and the Demand-side for Policy Improvements: Exploring Elite Beliefs About Vulnerability to Societal Problems
- When Corrections Fail: The Persistence of Political Misperceptions
- Emotion and the Framing of Risky Choice
- Estimators for Topic-Sampling Designs
- The social psychology of economic inequality, redistribution, and subjective well-being
- Citizen Legislators: Citizens on Top and Experts on Tap in the French Convention for Climate (2019–20)
- Misinformation and Motivated Reasoning: Responses to Economic News in a Politicized Environment
- Beyond Belief Change: The Persuasive Returns of Targeting Attitude–Relevant Beliefs
- Are Survey Experiments Externally Valid?
- Belief Echoes: The Persistent Effects of Corrected Misinformation
- Defining Misinformation and Understanding its Bounded Nature: Using Expertise and Evidence for Describing Misinformation
- The continued influence effect: Examining how age, retraction, and delay impact inferential reasoning
- Propaganda, Misinformation, and the Epistemic Value of Democracy
- Collective attention in the age of (mis)information
- The Nature and Origins of Misperceptions: Understanding False and Unsupported Beliefs About Politics
- My child is one in a million: Parents hesitant to vaccinate their children, or communities of practice in the field of (alternative) medicine
- Bias and ignorance in demographic perception
- Perceptions of Ethnic Minority Discrimination: Statistics and Stories Move Majorities
- Quirks of cognition explain why we dramatically overestimate the size of minority groups
- Misperceptions about Immigration: Reviewing Their Nature, Motivations and Determinants
- Social Media, Misinformation, and Attitudes Towards Democracy in Germany During the Covid-19 Pandemic
- Are competent citizens critical democrats? Political resources and evaluations of democratic institutions
- The Impact of Increased Learning Opportunities on Political Knowledge: Evidence From Repeated Cross-Sectional Surveys in Finland in 2008 and 2020
- Generalizing Survey Experiments Using Topic Sampling: An Application to Party Cues
- The variant of efforts avoiding strain: successful correction of a scientific discourse related to COVID-19
- “We Don’t Know” Means “They’re Not Sure”
- Media effects, selection effects, or no effects? A longitudinal analysis of the relationship between media use and misperceptions
- Public Ignorance or Elitist Jargon? Reconsidering Americans’ Overestimates of Government Waste and Foreign Aid
- Conversational AI increases political knowledge as effectively as self-directed internet search
- Debunking misinformation on critical race theory
- How do different sources of policy analysis affect policy preferences? Experimental evidence from the United States
- Sticker Shock
- Misinformation and Its Correction
- Measuring Misperceptions?
- The psychological drivers of misinformation belief and its resistance to correction
- Earnings information and public preferences for university tuition: Evidence from representative experiments
- Belief change in times of crisis: Providing facts about COVID-19-induced inequalities closes the partisan divide but fuels intra-partisan polarization about inequality
- Adapting Security Warnings to Counter Online Disinformation
- Joseph Schumpeter LectureIdeology
- Political Communication Faces the 21st Century
- Persuasion and Resistance: Race and the Death Penalty in America
- How Labor Unions Increase Political Knowledge: Evidence from the United States
- Misinformation and public opinion of science and health: Approaches, findings, and future directions
- Myopic Voters and Natural Disaster Policy
- Why the "Death Panel" Myth Wouldn't Die: Misinformation in the Health Care Reform Debate
- Social Media, Political Polarization, and Political Disinformation: A Review of the Scientific Literature
- Fake news on Twitter during the 2016 U.S. presidential election
- The Dunning–Kruger Effect
- The Genesis of the Birther Rumor: Partisanship, Racial Attitudes, and Political Knowledge
- Science vs conspiracy: collective narratives in the age of misinformation. [europepmc]
- Trend of Narratives in the Age of Misinformation. [europepmc]
- Emotional Dynamics in the Age of Misinformation. [europepmc]
- Processing political misinformation: comprehending the Trump phenomenon. [europepmc]
- Debunking in a world of tribes. [europepmc]
- Epistemic beliefs' role in promoting misperceptions and conspiracist ideation. [europepmc]
- Social media's contribution to political misperceptions in U.S. Presidential elections. [europepmc]
- Recursive patterns in online echo chambers. [europepmc]
- We Are All Victims: Questionable Content and Collective Victimisation in the Digital Age. [europepmc]
- Can you believe it? An investigation into the impact of retraction source credibility on the continued influence effect. [europepmc]
- Corrections of political misinformation: no evidence for an effect of partisan worldview in a US convenience sample. [europepmc]
- From "the Moon Is Rounder Abroad" to "Bravo, My Country": How China Misperceives the World. [europepmc]
- "I enjoy thinking critically, and I'm in control": Examining the influences of media literacy factors on misperceptions amidst the COVID-19 infodemic. [europepmc]
- Belief change in times of crisis: Providing facts about COVID-19-induced inequalities closes the partisan divide but fuels intra-partisan polarization about inequality. [europepmc]
- Classification of Covid-19 misinformation on social media based on neuro-fuzzy and neural network: A systematic review. [europepmc]
- On the relationship between conspiracy theory beliefs, misinformation, and vaccine hesitancy. [europepmc]
- Understanding the Social Mechanism of Cancer Misinformation Spread on YouTube and Lessons Learned: Infodemiological Study. [europepmc]
- "I Just Don't Know What to Believe": Sensemaking during the COVID-19 Pandemic among Criminal Legal Involved Communities. [europepmc]
- Anti-Vaccine Discourse on Social Media: An Exploratory Audit of Negative Tweets about Vaccines and Their Posters. [europepmc]
- Affective Polarization and Misinformation Belief. [europepmc]
- Would I lie to you? Party affiliation is more important than Brexit in processing political misinformation. [europepmc]
- Fake news, disinformation and misinformation in social media: a review. [europepmc]
- Scientists' deficit perception of the public impedes their behavioral intentions to correct misinformation. [europepmc]
- Exploring disparities in self-reported knowledge about neurotechnology. [europepmc]
- Understanding factual belief polarization: the role of trust, political sophistication, and affective polarization. [europepmc]
Discussions
Related