How Do Citizens Define and Recognize Disinformation by Politicians: an Interview Study

Truth in contemporary politics appears to be increasingly contested, with political lies becoming more prominent. When citizens believe politicians are lying, the social contract underlying representative democracy is violated. While there is a broad consensus about the potential harm of these lies, there is surprisingly little research about how citizens themselves define political lies and how they recognize them. Existing research has mostly approached political deception from a top-down perspective, relying on expert or academic definitions and overlooking how people interpret or respond to political deception. This study addresses this gap by adopting a bottom-up approach that centers on citizens' understanding of political lying. Our study asks two central questions: how do citizens define political lies, and how do these definitions shape their perception of political lying? In doing so, the study examines how political lies are recognized, highlighting that individuals' own definitions might influence their perceptions of political deception. The study employs qualitative focus groups and in-depth interviews with citizens in Belgium and the United Kingdom; with participants recruited through community centers. Using an abductive research design, the research first establishes a framework conceptualizing different practices of political deception based on existing theoretical literature, then examines whether citizens recognize and apply similar categories, perceive these practices as equivalent, or hold altogether different conceptions. This iterative approach allows inductively identified citizen conceptions absent from existing scholarship to be integrated into the analytical framework. The findings shed light on how citizens define political lies, the extent to which they differentiate between various forms of deception, and how these understandings shape their perceptions of political lying.