The Politics of Evidence Selection

Debates about how politicians handle information typically center on interpretation rather than selection. We focus on this earlier and often hidden step and argue that partisan perspectives shape which evidence politicians attend to in the first place. We test this claim in a real-world field setting during the 2024 Austrian parliamentary election campaign. Three weeks before election day, we emailed 1,822 candidates links to two high-quality research briefings on the same immigration policy reform: one emphasizing how benefit cuts reduce migrant inflows, the other that such cuts increase poverty among immigrants. By tracking click behavior, we measured which type of evidence each candidate selected. Our analysis shows that selection of ideologically aligned evidence is concentrated among extreme parties: candidates from the far-right Freedom Party of Austria disproportionately choose aligned evidence, while centrist candidates show more balanced patterns. A contemporaneous survey of 1,428 citizens indicates that far-right supporters approve of elites' selective attention to evidence, suggesting alignment between elite behavior and mass preferences at the political fringes. These results identify evidence selection as an important stage in policymaking and imply that rising far-right electoral strength may amplify reliance on supportive information, potentially increasing the risk of ill-informed policy decisions.