The Politics of Evidence Selection
Abstract
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.
About this workshop
The Public Governance workshop is an online seminar series focused on state of art research in political economy that uses non-traditional data and data-intensive methods.
The workshop gives a platform for the research on the role of governance in designing and developing better policies. Key features are the political environment, the role of the media, the engagement of stakeholders such as civil society and firms, the market structure and level of competition, and the independence of public regulators, among others. Particular emphasis is placed on research with NLP methods due to the proven usefulness of transforming text into data for further econometric analysis.
Periodicity: Mondays from 17h30 to 19h.