Information Matters: Revisiting Citizen Engagement with Facts About Immigration Under Affective Polarization in the United Kingdom

Globally, concerns about immigration have animated political divisions. As academics and journalists increasingly assume false beliefs partly underpin these concerns, fact-checking and information campaigns have gained traction as ways of either expressly challenging incorrect views, or promoting accurate information that changes attitudes in implicitly more favourable directions. Yet answers as to whether facts actually achieve these goals remain unsettled for several reasons. Perhaps chief among them is the prominence of affective polarization which leads co-partisans to view the other ‘side’ and its messaging more negatively. This potentially blunts or even reverse the effects of communication interventions, particularly when those interventions are associated with partisan perspectives. Studies over the past decade have examined how and in which circumstances citizens respond to factual corrections. A recent meta-analysis concludes that, while partisanship dampens the size and longevity of information effects—particularly among conservative respondents—overall, citizens do not reject corrections and become even more attached to false beliefs (indicating an absence of ‘backfire’). However, most work examining this derives from the US, limiting scholars’ abilities to assess the political consequences of affective polarization in other established democracies. Therefore, we contribute evidence drawn from our combined and collaborative research agendas in the UK context, one that displays high degrees of affective polarization along its Leave-Remain divide in the wake of the 2016 EU Referendum. As such, we argue this presents a difficult—yet illuminating—case for exploring the efficacy of factual interventions. First, is the mechanism implied within fact-checking on immigration (that more knowledge leads to more positive attitudes) vulnerable to reverse causality? Using counterfactual modelling applied to British Election Study data, we show how a more knowledgeable electorate would be less likely to support restrictive immigration policies and would view immigrants’ economic impacts more favourably. Second, does factual and positive information about immigration—likely to be associated with a Remain perspective—specifically change Leave voters’ views? We experimentally show that different forms of evidence demonstrating non-EU immigrants’ contributions, conditional on the type of threat they address, cause Leave voters to express more positive immigration attitudes. Third, do these information effects hold for different immigrant populations and communication modes? We extend the second study by considering visual treatments (e.g., charts and infographic video) that convey how EU immigrants to the UK have modestly positive impacts on the UK economy. Again, we find these positive messages—whether appearing in text-only or formats combining visuals and text—impact Leave voters’ attitudes, which is all the more striking given the focus on European immigrants. Moreover, the treatments moved policy preferences in the expected direction, contrasting with prior studies that find immigration preferences to be less malleable. By suggesting there is scope for relevant, multimodal, and factual interventions to impact attitudes and preferences under conditions of affective polarization, our results connect with ongoing empirical and normative debates about the role of information in politics and policymaking. This opens avenues for future comparative research involving other media and issues—directions in which we aim to move going forward.