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AbstractAn emerging narrative contends that 2016 was significant for bridging identity politics and American party conflict. This narrative misses a fundamental truth: for ordinary Americans, partisan identity has always been grounded in their orientations toward groups in society. Thegroup theory of partiesholds that citizens evaluate political parties according to their social stereotypes of Democrats and Republicans, ultimately identifying (or not) with a party that jives with their own self-image. In this essay, I review existing research and summarize several original studies suggesting that citizens' beliefs about party composition affect their feelings toward Democrats and Republicans. Americans tend to hold shockingly erroneous beliefs about the degree to which stereotypical groups compose the parties – for example, that 38% of Republicans belong to the economic "1%" – and correcting social stereotypes about the out-party reduces polarization between rank-and-file party supporters. Most studies discussed in this essay were conducted before Donald Trump became a candidate, suggesting that 2016 was not the year that identity politics hijacked the parties, but rather the year in which the implicit group basis for mass partisanship became baldly explicit.

AbstractWhile Amazon's Mechanical Turk (MTurk) has reduced the cost of collecting original data, in 2018, researchers noted the potential existence of a large number of bad actors on the platform. To evaluate data quality on MTurk, we fielded three surveys between 2018 and 2020. While we find no evidence of a "bot epidemic," significant portions of the data—between 25 and 35 percent—are of dubious quality. While the number of IP addresses that completed the survey multiple times or circumvented location requirements fell almost 50 percent over time, suspicious IP addresses are more prevalent on MTurk than on other platforms. Furthermore, many respondents appear to respond humorously or insincerely, and this behavior increased over 200 percent from 2018 to 2020. Importantly, these low-quality responses attenuate observed treatment effects by magnitudes ranging from approximately 10 to 30 percent.

To improve representation and alleviate polarization among US lawmakers, many have promoted open primaries—allowing voters to choose candidates from any party—but the evidence that this reform works is mixed. To determine whether open primaries lead voters to choose ideologically proximate candidates, we conducted a statewide experiment just before California's 2012 primaries, the first conducted under a new top‐two format. We find that voters failed to distinguish moderate and extreme candidates. As a consequence, voters actually chose more ideologically distant candidates on the new ballot, and the reform failed to improve the fortunes of moderate congressional and state senate candidates.

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Misinformation among Mass Audiences as a Focus for Inquiry -- PART I Dimensions of Audience Awareness of Misinformation -- ONE Believing Things That Are Not True: A Cognitive Science Perspective on Misinformation -- TWO Awareness of Misinformation in Health-Related Advertising: A Narrative Review of the Literature -- THREE The Importance of Measuring Knowledge in the Age of Misinformation and Challenges in the Tobacco Domain -- FOUR Measuring Perceptions of Shares of Groups -- FIVE Dimensions of Visual Misinformation in the Emerging Media Landscape -- PART II Theoretical Effects and Consequences of Misinformation -- SIX The Effects of False Information in News Stories -- SEVEN Can Satire and Irony Constitute Misinformation? -- EIGHT Media and Political Misperceptions -- NINE Misinformation and Science: Emergence, Diffusion, and Persistence -- TEN Doing the Wrong Things for the Right Reasons: How Environmental Misinformation Affects Environmental Behavior -- PART III Solutions and Remedies for Misinformation -- ELEVEN Misinformation and Its Correction: Cognitive Mechanisms and Recommendations for Mass Communication -- TWELVE How to Counteract Consumer Product Misinformation -- THIRTEEN A History of Fact Checking in U.S. Politics and Election Contexts -- FOURTEEN Comparing Approaches to Journalistic Fact Checking -- FIFTEEN The Role of Middle-Level Gatekeepers in the Propagation and Longevity of Misinformation -- SIXTEEN Encouraging Information Search to Counteract Misinformation: Providing "Balanced" Information about Vaccines -- Conclusion: An Agenda for Misinformation Research -- Contributors -- Index