Mistrust, Disnews, and Vote Choice: A Panel Survey on the Origins and Consequences of Believing Disinformation in the German Parliamentary Election

Disinformation campaigns try to undermine the voters’ ability to make their decisions on the basis of accurate beliefs. This involves a danger for the quality and legitimacy of the democratic process, as a well-informed electorate is essential for an efficient collective self-determination of democracies. In this paper, we address the question of whether online-spread disinforming news actually possesses the power to change the prevailing political circumstances during an election campaign. We highlight factors for believing disinformation, which until now have not been paid much attention for, namely trust in news media and trust in politics. A panel survey in the context of the German parliamentary election 2017 (N = 989) shows that believing disinforming news indeed had a specific impact on vote choice by alienating voters from the main governing party (i.e., the Christian Democrats), and notably drove them into the arms of right-wing populists (i.e., the AfD). Furthermore, we demonstrate that the less one trusts in news media and politics, the more one believes in online disinformation. Hence, we provided empirical evidence for Bennett’s and Livingston’s notion of a disinformation order which forms in opposition to the established information system to disrupt democracy.