A Cross-National Experiment on Accusation of Disinformation and Affective Polarization During the 2024 European Parliamentary Elections

Research has suggested that an increase in polarization within the political landscape is one of the key threats to democratic systems (Kingzette et al., 2021). Accusations of disinformation are a discursive strategy employed by political actors to undermine political opponents and media sources (Egelhofer & Lecheler, 2019; Hameleers, 2020). This paper investigates the relationship between the deployment of a disinformation accusation by or towards political actors of varying ideological positions, the ideological congruence between citizens and the actors involved in the accusations and affective polarization. Using the framework of partisan motivated reasoning (Kunda, 1990; Taber & Lodge, 2006; Kahan, 2013), we seek to investigate if individuals use the similarity between themselves and the source of information, in this case the political actors involved in the accusation of disinformation, as a heuristic (Freiling and Wahlder, 2021) leading them to report higher affect towards ideologically congruent actors and lower affect towards ideologically incongruent actors. Further, given that this discursive strategy is most prominent in right-wing populist communication (Kluknavská et al, 2024), it is expected that these effects will be stronger for far-right political actors than left-wing or right-wing mainstream political actors. We conducted a 3 (actor/group ideology: left-wing vs. right-wing vs. far right) x 2 (direction: accuser vs. accused) between subjects cross-national experiment in the lead up to the 2024 European Parliamentary elections. Participants were randomly assigned to one of 24 conditions in which they were exposed to a social media post. In each post a EU parliamentary group either accused an opposing group of spreading disinformation or responded to an accusation made by an opposing group. To test our expectations, we conducted a series of regression analyses. To assess affective polarization, we calculated the distance in reported affect between the actor making the accusation and the actor that is being accused. We assess level of congruency between respondent and actors by asking the likelihood the individual will vote for the party where the respective actor belongs to (11-point scale). In our analyses, we include country-level fixed effects and control for issue that is discussed in the condition (immigration or climate change). Preliminary results find that the distance in reported affect between the accusing and accuser actors is indeed different across conditions. A far right actor is accusing a left-wing actor leads to an increase in affective polarization between left-wing and far right actors. Similarly, a right-wing actor accusing a far right actor leads to an increase affective polarization between left-wing and far right actors. A far right actor accusing a right-wing actor leads to an increase in affective polarization between left-wing and far right actors, as well as left-wing and right-wing actors. Preliminary results also suggest that ideological congruence with the accused and accusing actors leads to an increase in affective polarization, however effect sizes are small. These preliminary results lend some support to the hypothesis that disinformation accusations have an impact on affective polarization, specifically accusations involving right wing actors.