Not just the facts: an index for measuring the information density of political communication
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Not just the facts: an index for measuring the information density of political communication Lauri Rapeli1 · Sakari Nieminen2 · Marko Mäkelä3 Accepted: 21 November 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Misinformation and biased opinion-formation plague contemporary politics. Fact-checking, the process of verifying accuracy of political claims, is now an expanding reseach area, but the methodology is underdeveloped. While the journalistic practice of fact-checking is by now well-established as an integral part of political news coverage, academic research requires more stringent methods than what journalists thus far have used. In order to advance the scientific study of fact-checking, we propose two variants of an index measuring the information density of verbal political communication. The main index combines three dimensions: (1) factual accuracy of political claims, (2) their relevance and (3) the magnitude of observed communication. In the article, we argue for the significance of each of these components. Depending on the research problem and data, the indices can be used for comparisons of political actors across different contexts such as countries or time points, or in non-comparative situations. Using examples, we demonstrate that the indices produce intuitive results. Keywords Fact-checking · Index · Information density · Political communication · Political rhetoric
* Lauri Rapeli [email protected] Sakari Nieminen [email protected] Marko Mäkelä [email protected] 1
The Social Science Research Institute, Åbo Akademi University, Fänriksgatan 3 ASA A4, 20500 Åbo Finland, Finland
2
Department of Philosophy, Contemporary History and Political Science, University of Turku, Turku, Finland
3
Department of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Turku, Turku, Finland
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1 Introduction Political communication is experiencing a period of rapid and continuing change (Krupnikov and Searles 2019). The declining quality of political information through news reporting has been identified as one of the key developments in the field. It is viewed as a particularly significant threat to the educative function of political communication through mass media (Van Aelst et al. 2017). Indeed, the emergence of phenomena such as ‘posttruth politics’, ‘fake news’ and ‘Twitter politics’, (e.g. Lazer et al. 2018) has given rise to an ever-growing literature dealing with various aspects of the (mis)use of facts in political speech. Scholars have looked at the role of misinformation in attitude formation, (e.g. Nyhan and Reifler 2010), the nature and prevalence of misperceptions, (e.g. Flynn, Nyhan, and Reifler 2017) and the journalistic practice of fact-checking, (e.g. Graves 2017). While there is a vivid scholarly debate on the epistemology of fact-checking (e.g. Graves 2017; Uscinski and Butler 2013), scholars have, however, mostly left it to the journalists to conduct empirical measurements of factual accuracy in contemporary political rhetoric.1 Although fact-checking, i.e., the asse
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