Political Communication in a Post-Truth Era

Abstract

The “Fake News”-phenomenon raises larger concerns within political communication research: are information and factuality less valuable in times where citizens’ opinions seem based on ideology, preference, and emotion? Does this create dysfunctional relationships between media, politics and citizens? This panel invites papers studying political communication in a “post-truth” context. We are looking for submissions focusing issues of source credibility, detection and counteraction of misinformation, shifting patterns of political and media trust, or studying the consequences of fake news and misinformation. We welcome contributions both from theoretical and empirical perspectives. We also encourage interdisciplinary submissions, such as crossovers between political communication, text analysis, social network analysis, or other forms of computational social sciences.