Replication Data for: Political Orientation, Information and Perceptions of Election Fraud: Evidence from Russia

Citizen perceptions of the extent of fraud in a given authoritarian election can differ widely. In this paper, I build on the literature on information acquisition and processing in democracies to argue that much of this variation is due to the way in which citizens’ underlying political orientations affect both the kind of information they gather and how they process information that they do receive. To test the theory, I use observational data and a survey experiment from Russia to show that citizens who differ in their orientation towards the regime also differ in political information and in how they process information. These differences in information acquisition and processing are likely to have important implications for the effect of information in general in contemporary authoritarian regimes and for election monitoring in particular.