Civic Learning on Campus: Bringing Political Science In Mini-Conference III: The Trouble with Facts: Reimagining the Role of Information in Democracy

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Part of Mini-Conference

• Civic Learning on Campus: Bringing Political Science In Mini-Conference III

Session Description

The effort to combat misinformation and disinformation is at once crucial to a robust democracy and yet also at odds with some of its central tenets. People need to know what is true about the conditions of our shared society in order to make reasonable judgments on what to do; it is for good reason that Thomas Jefferson stated, or even more tellingly is widely quoted as stating, that a “well-informed electorate is a prerequisite to democracy.” And Hannah Arendt, who against the grain of many theorists of deliberation insisted that public discourse is not about abstracting out of personal opinion but rather seeking to understand the opinions held by others, nonetheless emphasized that there must be a world in common about which to hold differing opinions. False information, whether deliberately falsified or not, threatens the world in common and the sound basis by which citizens make decisions.

Yet also liberal democracy is premised on the idea that nobody has truth in the bag. Indeed, Mill’s conviction that epistemic excellence requires an open field in which competing ideas come into contact has become a foundation upon which this form of society is built and justified. As well, partly for this reason but also in order to protect the rights of the individual, liberal democracies protect free expression. Especially in the United States this right has been robust and widely protective. In particular according to this premise, governing authorities and other elites should not control the ideas people can express, even if they are sure that those ideas are misguided.

While campaigns to combat mis-and dis-information seem caught on the horns of this dilemma about competing requirements for democracy, these efforts also tend to rest on a less acknowledged assumption. The refrain that ‘if only people had the facts, they would agree with me’ is as seductive as it is untrue. People tend to assume that they see the world correctly, and so when they look to agreement on the facts as a solution to political divisions, they often tacitly imagine that this will involve that others come to agree with them. In contexts of deep division, however, this insistence is likely to deepen divisions rather than bridge them, and so campaigns to spread the ‘right’ information are less about finding agreement and more about getting others to agree with “us.”

This panel calls into question the premise that a central problem of democracy is the spread of incorrect information. The papers instead examine the social processes that shape whether and how people come into contact with information, and what they do with information when they learn it. The panel examines too the implications of these social processes for efforts to communicate across epistemic divides. Finally, the papers consider the implications for educational efforts to strengthen democracy.

The panel papers tackle different dimensions of this central set of dilemmas. Ben-Porath examines the macro-level context of how and why political polarization extends beyond division over ethical-political decisions to include the kind of evidence deemed relevant to these decisions. Wahl explores how this process takes shape on a micro-level, drawing on in-depth interviews with polarized college students to understand how their interpretive communities shape to which facts they give emotional attention and weight. Finally, Laden assesses the social landscape of trust at the root of these distinctions and how educators might begin to ameliorate the abyss of trust between political communities.

In keeping with the panel’s emphasis on dialogue, the panel will strive to move beyond the typical monological format. Panelists will ask the audience to think of the paper presentations as provocations for discussion. At the conclusion of the paper presentations, rather than take discrete questions, the floor will be opened for a seminar-style discussion in which audience members will be encouraged to talk with each other as much as with the panel.

Discussant: Sophia Rosenfeld is Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History and Chair of the Department of History at the University of Pennsylvania, where she teaches European and American intellectual and cultural history with a special emphasis on the Enlightenment, the trans-Atlantic Age of Revolutions, and the legacy of the eighteenth century for modern democracy.

Sub Unit

• Theme Panel

Individual Presentations

• Evidence in Polarized Democracies - Sigal R. Ben-Porath, University of Pennsylvania

• Trust in Polarized Democracies - Anthony Simon Laden

• Empathy in Polarized Democracies - Rachel Lee Wahl, University of Virginia

Chair

• Rachel Lee Wahl University of Virginia