Fact-Checking Politicians

Andrea Mattozzi, Samuel Nocito and Francesco Sobbrio

No 10122, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: We study the reaction of national politicians to rigorous fact-checking of their public statements. Our research design relies on a novel randomized field experiment conducted in collaboration with a leading fact-checking company. Our results show that fact-checking discourages politicians from making factually incorrect statements, with effects lasting several weeks. At the same time, we document that fact-checking neither increases nor displaces correct statements. Instead, fact-checked politicians tend to substitute incorrect statements with either no statements or with unverifiable ones. This suggests that they also respond by increasing the “ambiguity” of their language to escape the possibility of public scrutiny.

Keywords: fact-checking; politicians; accountability; verifiability; ambiguity; RCT (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 D78 D80 D91 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp
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Related works:
Working Paper: Fact-checking Politicians (2024)
Working Paper: Fact-checking Politicians (2022)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ces:ceswps:_10122

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