Politics in the age of post-truth (Disinformation, misinformation, hate politics and conspiracy)

Few claims about contemporary democracy have drawn as much scholarly attention as the idea that politics has entered an age of "post-truth". Yet it remains unclear to what extent this concept reflects a genuine change in the truth-value of political claims, and to what extent it relates to a crisis of trust driven by growing hostility and aggressiveness in political disagreements. This panel takes this claim seriously, asking what has genuinely changed in the relationship between political conflict and factual authority, and what explains the changes that we can actually document.
The panel invites papers on three related sets of questions. The first concerns the supply side: who produces and circulates misleading political content - parties and candidates, governments and foreign states, media outlets, platforms, or actors pursuing profit rather than power? Do negativity, incivility and conspiratorial appeals pay off, and if so, why? The second set of questions concerns the demand side: how do individual biases, prior loyalties and motivated cognition shape political perceptions? Why do conspiracy theories appeal, and to whom? Under what conditions do corrections work or fail? The third concerns perceptions of the environment itself: not what citizens believe, but what they believe others believe. How much misinformation and hostility do citizens think surrounds them? How far do these estimates depart from measured levels? And what do such gaps do to trust, political participation and tolerance of opponents?
We are particularly interested in papers that connect elite incentives, information environments and citizen judgements. We equally welcome papers that establish which claims about the dysfunctions of contemporary democracies are demonstrated, which are plausible but unproven, and which have entered conventional wisdom largely by repetition.
We welcome experimental, survey-based, computational, qualitative, comparative and conceptual contributions, and are especially interested in evidence from political systems outside Western Europe and the United States, where most existing research has been produced and where its assumptions about party competition, media structure and social cleavage do not travel automatically. Papers reporting weak, null or contradictory results are of particular value, since the field's headline claims have at times outrun the evidence supporting them.