Tailoring the Truth misinformation and responsiveness in Germany 11th August 2021 - Regierungsforschung

Working Paper

 Matthias Diermeier

 Tailoring the Truth
 An experimental approach to parliamentarians’ toleration of
 misinformation and responsiveness in Germany

11th August 2021

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Please cite as

Diermeier, Matthias (2021): Tailoring the Truth, An experimental approach to parliamentarians’ toleration of
misinformation and responsiveness in Germany, Working Paper, published on: regierungsforschung.de

Tailoring the Truth
An experimental approach to parliamentarians’ toleration of misinfor-
mation and responsiveness in Germany

Von Matthias Diermeier1

Abstract

The rise of populist radical right parties (PRRPs) is largely seen to have been triggered by a de-
alignment between voters and political elites and to have triggered an increasing supply of misin-
formation. Consequently, the German populist radical right party Alternative für Deutschland
(AfD) is strongly associated with the notion that ‘fake news’ endanger democracy (Reuter et al.,
2019). Whereas most studies focus on ‘fake news’ dynamics in social media, this contribution
analyses one-to-one communication between politicians and constituents in an experimental set-
ting. For this purpose, all 2,503 German parliamentarians of the federal political system receive
an artificial inquiry including a piece of misinformation that circulates among the different elec-
torates. The experiment reveals a division in political communication between established parties
and the AfD. Politicians of established parties seem to be intrinsically driven by the ideal of a good
democratic representative. They significantly abstain from tolerating misinformation, are more
responsive and their overall communication behaviour is much less strategic. What is more, AfD
parliamentarians are seven times as eager to tolerate ‘fake news’ – a number that becomes even
higher when facing an immigration related piece of misinformation circulating within the populist
radical right’s electorate. Finally, the AfD’s communication behaviour reflects their intention to
sow distrust in the German society, economy, and administration.

1 Matthias Diermeier is a trained economist who focuses on political economy. His research agenda centers on the eco-

nomic drivers and societal divisions behind the rise of the populist radical right in Europe. He is the personal research
assistant of the director at the German Economic Institute (IW) and a PhD candidate in Political Science at the NRW
School of Governance, University of Duisburg-Essen.
Matthias Diermeier is grateful for comments from Karl-Rudolf Korte and Max Schiffers.

1. Introduction

It is the nature of political competition that different parties stress different aspects of the same
political issue. The recent debate on ‘fake news’ and ‘factfulness’, however, has raised awareness
for a structural manipulation of potential voters’ opinions (Pennycook et al., 2018). Hence, when
analysing US politics “do facts matter?” is the fundamental question asked by Hochschild and Ein-
stein (2015). Anti-establishment populist radical right parties (PRRPs) – who claim to be particu-
larly responsive to ‘the people’ (Mudde, 2007) – have been accused of strategically disregarding
facts, spreading misinformation, and triggering a polarization of the entire political system (Berg-
mann, 2018; Castanho Silva, 2018; Runciman, 2018). These pieces of misinformation can contain
complex conspiracy myths. However, ‘fake news’ also include rather simple falsifiable statements
such as White House press secretary Sean Spicer’s pretension that Donald Trump was received by
the largest inauguration crowd in the history of the United States (The Guardian, 2017), Boris John-
son’s famous Brexit campaign claim the UK would send 350 million Pound to the EU every week
(Full Fact, 2017) or the German Alternative für Deutschland’s (AfD) exaggeration that the foreign-
ers’ homicide rate in Germany had increased by 685 percent in 2018 (Tagesschau, 2019). Successful
political campaigns manage to circumvent traditional gatekeepers by exploiting digital filter bub-
bles: Particularly, the radical right has become a super-spreader of misinformation and tolerates
‘fake news’ within their communities as it serves their political agenda (Allcott and Gentzkow, 2017;
Cantarella et al., 2019; Guess et al., 2020). Additionally, for Germany Knuth and Mayr conclude:
“Like Trump, the AfD lives on the decay of certainty” (own translation, 2020).

Although the ‘fake news’ literature is limited to the semi-public digital world mostly focusing on
social media, unfiltered political communication also involves direct one-to-one voter-politician
communication. Recently, these discourses have been analysed in innovative responsiveness ex-
periments based on constituent inquiries: In the US, senators were found to strategically tailor their
answers on a controversial issue congruent with the stated constituents’ preferences – although
without explicitly spreading ‘fake news’ (Grose et al., 2015). Until today, this strand of literature
leaves aside the special role, direct voter-politician communication plays for the radical right.
Whereas PRRPs seem to be the driving force behind misinformation circulating in social media, it
remains an open question whether the same is true for one-to-one communication between voters
and politicians. The following analysis bridges this gap by carrying out a citizens’ inquiry experi-
ment addressing the following research questions:

Does PRRP politicians’ responsiveness stand out in one-to-one communication with constituents? Or is
political communication, spreading and tolerating misinformation more generally related to party
specific issue salience and positioning?

The German political system represents a fruitful example for such a responsiveness misinfor-
mation communication experiment focussing on PRRP parliamentarians. On the one hand, in times
of COVID-19 several German parliamentarians have stressed the importance of answering citizens’
inquiries remotely (Tagesspiegel, 2020). On the other hand, the far right AfD regularly claims to be
particularly responsive and to represent ‘the true people’ (“wir sind das Volk”) (Geiges, 2018; Siri

and Lewandowsky, 2019) while being criticized of spreading misinformation by its competitors and
the media (br, 2020; mdr, 2019; ZeitOnline, 2019).

What is more, 89 AfD parliamentarians on the national and 236 AfD parliamentarians on the state
level represent a significant number of potential respondents. At the same time, the six large fac-
tions present in the German parliament allow a gradual responsiveness analysis depending on the
respective party’s positioning and issue salience. Particularly, the AfD’s cultural antagonist, the
Green Party enables a viable comparison of political communication in constituent inquiries – with
67 parliamentarians on the national and 266 parliamentarians on the state level.

The present analysis builds a bridge between the PRRP misinformation literature that solely focus-
ses on social media and the experimental approaches that miss to zoom in on the populist radical
right behaviour in answering citizens inquiries: A total population experiment of one-to-one citi-
zens-parliamentarians communication of all 2.580 political representatives of a federal political
system is carried out. The concept of ‘fake news’ is operationalized for the AfD’s and the Green Par-
ties’ core issues – immigration and climate change – and a control topic based on misinformation
that actually circulate within the electorate. Finally, the experiment fills a pressing gap in the liter-
ature by analysing the response behaviour in direct citizens-parliamentarians communication
when being confronted with misinformation.

The remainder of this paper is structured as follows. The following section gives an overview over
the ‘fake news’ and responsiveness debate in the context of the right-wing populist rise. A special
focus is laid on experimental approaches to explore politicians’ communication behaviour and the
mechanisms why misinformation would be spread or tolerated when being directly addressed by
constituents. The third section explains the empirical strategy and the experimental design that is
chosen to pursue the research question. The fourth section explains the results and carves out
whether the AfD plays a special role in spreading misinformation and in the voter-politician respon-
siveness. A final section concludes with the most important findings. Important ethical considera-
tions are summarised in Appendix 1.

2. Literature review

2.1 Tailoring the truth on the populist right: The German case

It is a well-established finding that political competition contains more than simple differences in
parties’ issue positioning. When political actors jockey for power, language plays a fundamental
role (Korte, 2002). Which political voices are heard, which topics can be introduced to the political
arena (agenda setting) and how issues are framed is crucial for political power structures and fi-
nally for election outcomes (Klüser and Radojevic, 2016). Scholars have recently focused on the art
of narrative storytelling in political competition: Namely, the importance of weaving a political or
economic agenda into powerful emotionally anchored narrations (Koschorke, 2012; Shiller, 2019).
The populist radical right employs such communication strategies to break through the “conspiracy
of silence” (Arzheimer, 2009) that was established around them. By introducing extreme language

and new anti-immigration narratives, PRRPs manage to gain centre stage in the political discourse,
finally triggering a strongly polarized political system (Castanho Silva, 2018).

The understanding of political competition as a struggle over genuinely normative narratives puts
the lively debate on the rise of the radical right into perspective. Indeed, electoral success by PRRPs
has been answered by the established political powers ringfencing the newcomers’ extreme posi-
tioning and language in a “cordon sanitaire” (Downs, 2002; Heinze, 2018; Mudde, 2007). By making
sure PRRPs are considered disreputable, established players intent to prevent that gatekeepers
such as media representatives allow the right-wingers from feeding their messages into the estab-
lished public space.2 Such a strategy is fundamentally put into question by the mass use of social
media, opening a new channel to directly address the electorate that is both cheaper and more lu-
crative than large scale campaigns:3 By blocking radical ‘insurgent’ politicians from traditional me-
dia, the radicals are virtually forced into social media campaigns. Successful social media strategies
are built on regularly causing sensations by extreme exaggerations or deliberate provocations that
traditional media inevitably must pick up (Manow, 2020). In this context it is argued that polariza-
tion itself has become a political business model (Taibbi, 2019): By stressing negative (fake) stories
on immigration, agitating radical right candidates have taken advantage of vicious circles of polar-
ization and (social) media attention (Berning et al., 2019; Gerstlé and Nai, 2019; Mounk, 2018; Re-
uning and Dietrich, 2018; Schmidt, 2020). Interestingly, the same logic – however, based on differ-
ent issues – has been detected in campaigns of radical left-wing candidates such as of Jeremy Corbin
(Prince, 2016) or Bernie Sanders (Penney, 2017).

The rise of such radical politicians and their (social) media coverage is often associated with the
rise of misinformation – manipulative “by design” (Gelfert, 2018) – up to the proclamation of an age
of “post-truthism” (The Economist, 2016). ‘Fake news’, the post-truth currency, are defined as “false
stories that appear to be news, spread on the internet or using other media, usually created to in-
fluence political views or as a joke” (Cambridge Dictionary, 2020). Such a definition goes beyond
‘normal’ tailoring of the truth in narrative political storytelling (Gelfert, 2018) and resides some-
where in the “grey zone between advertising and propaganda” (Tandoc et al., 2018, p. 10).4

In Germany ‘fake news’ are largely attributed to the populist radical right-wing party AfD. The Ger-
man PRRP employs an anti-elite rhetoric, promotes a traditional way of life, stages itself as the de-
fender of a homogeneous, nativist nation state, opposes immigration and denies that climate change
resulted from human activities (Arzheimer and Berning, 2019; Jacob et al., 2020; Schmitt-Beck,

2 See van Aelst and Walgrave (2017) for a profound analysis on how the putative neutral media represents an important

independent actor in the political arena.
3 Surprisingly, Donald Trump entered the primaries in 2016 financially far behind other Republican candidates. Even at

the end of the primaries Hillary Clinton had raised more than four times his funding. What is more, the share of his election
campaign funding coming from ‘small donors’ (

2017) (see Figure 1 for an overview over positioning and salience). Mirroring its character as an
anti-immigration party, the party’s social media activity shows the typical issue focus of migration,
Europe, and Islam (Arzheimer and Berning, 2019). Moreover, typically for a PRRP, during the 2017
election campaign the party threatened to sue public television broadcasters for being underrepre-
sented in major political talk shows (Focus, 2017). Furthermore, the AfD dominates online commu-
nication among German parties and manages to circumvent potentially dividing topics by aggres-
sively focusing on anti-immigration positions (Serrano et al., 2019). Unsurprisingly, ‘fake news’
trackers reveal that seven of the ten most spread cases in the German federal election campaign
2017 have been shared by the German PRRP (Sängerlaub et al., 2018), nourishing anti-immigration
sentiments by including stories of immigrants as rapists and looters (Siri and Lewandowsky, 2019).
Also, more subtle misinformation such as the underestimation of refugees’ education levels have
been discussed controversially during the federal election campaign 2017 as several AfD represent-
atives circulated an article claiming only one third of immigrants graduated from high school,
whereas the true share lies much higher (ZeitOnline, 2017).5 In fact, the AfD is strongly attributed
to the rise of ‘fake news’ in Germany and the increasing perception that the spread of misinfor-
mation represents a threat for democracy in Germany (Reuter et al., 2019). In this context it is im-
portant to note that the nature of social media enables AfD politicians to spread anti-immigration
content from dubious sources by liking and sharing without necessarily making things up on their
own.

On the other cultural end of the party system, the Green Party embraces a multi-cultural society,
favours post-materialist values, advocates Germany as a country of immigration and stresses the
German responsibility in the fight against climate change as their main topic (Bündnis 90/Die
Grünen, 2020). Correspondingly, the Greens are positioned at the other extreme than the AfD in the
policy dimensions of immigration and the environment (see Figure 1). In contrast to most European
countries, the German Greens manage to politically cash in on their climate change issue-ownership
– especially in the European election of 2019 (Probst, 2020). The party’s recent success is closely
associated with rising issue salience of climate change in the context of the worldwide Fridays for
Future grassroot demonstrations (Weyers et al., 2020). In the German climate change debate the
Greens were accused by the AfD of “hysterical climate-crisis screeching” (own translation, Frindte
and Frindte, 2020) as the right-wingers demanded “fact-based climate and energy politics” (own,
translation, Deutscher Bundestag, 2018).

5 See different volumes of refugees’ education statistics from the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees:

https://www.bamf.de/DE/Themen/Forschung/Veroeffentlichungen/BerichtsreihenMigrationIntegration/SoKo-Analy-
sen/soko-node.html

Figure 1: Issue positioning in the German party system; source: Chapel Hill Expert Survey (2020)

Hence, the AfD and the Greens promote opposing policy platforms in various topics – although the
AfD’s environmental positioning is rather low in salience (see Figure 1). Their electoral success can
be clearly attributed to a single-issue positioning: anti-immigration for the AfD; the fight against
climate change for the Greens. Furthermore, AfD politicians regularly assert a particular respon-
siveness as only they would be the true spokesperson of ‘the people’ while being criticized of
spreading misinformation. The Green Party successfully jumped on the popularity bandwagon of
the anti-climate-change movement by demanding political responsiveness to the influential grass-
root movement Fridays for Futures that had to be “taken serious” (own translation,
Bundestagsfraktion Bündnis 90 / Die Grünen, 2019). Their ‘factfulness’ in the climate change de-
bate has been questioned by the AfD.

2.2 New experimental evidence: responsiveness tests with parliamentarians

The discussed literature largely links the spread and tolerance of misinformation (by the radical
right) to semi-public social media communication. However, unfiltered direct communication be-
tween politicians and voters could be equally exploited for such purpose – while flying under the
radar of the public due to its lack of traceability. An important example of citizens getting in touch
with their representatives at low-cost are constituency inquiries (“contacting”) (Teorell et al.,
2006). For parliamentarians, inquiries from their constituency represent a comparably cheap and
well-targeted chance to convince potential voters (Cain et al., 1984). More recently, digital one-to-
one contacting of parliamentarians by voters has been analysed, as the mass use of internet com-
munication lowered the threshold to get in touch with authorities even further. Already in 2004,

members of the US Congress were bombarded with 200 million e-mails and letters (Fitch and Gold-
schmidt, 2005).

For reasons of data privacy protection, no such statistics are published or available upon request
for Members of the German Bundestag.6 As in the US, the varieties of political communication and
particularly the communication with their constituencies represents one of the core responsibili-
ties of German MP offices (Bröchler and Elbers, 2001). Bundestag parliamentarians and their staff
are understood to function as “political high-performance teams” (own translation, Lattrari, 2020)
that efficiently deal with a great variety of different tasks. However, there is a large diversity con-
cerning the level of specialization and distribution of tasks between MPs and their employees. For
the political communication this means that although oftentimes citizen requests might be an-
swered not by MPs themselves, citizens do not necessarily realize their inquiry has not been an-
swered by staff members.7 It is important to note that parliamentarians in Germany stand on a level
playing field in terms of funding, they are free to pick their own staff and design their own commu-
nication strategy. The Bundestag offers a monthly budget of 19.913 Euros for each parliamentarian
to be spent on their employees financing the salaries of a total staff of 4.500 people (Deutscher
Bundestag, 2015). It remains in the control of individual parliamentarians to devote resources to
answer citizen inquiries.8

Somewhat surprisingly given the vast (digital) engagement between representatives and their elec-
torate, Mair (2013) prominently detects a dealignment between political parties and the electorate
in Western democracies. In contrast to a professionalization of political communication in MP of-
fices and digitalization presumably closing the ranks between voters and their representatives, the
notion of an alienation between the political elite and their electorate is widely shared (Merkel,
2017; Rodríguez-Pose, 2018). In fact, Merkel (2018) qualifies that it “depends strongly on the action
or inaction of political elites and their interaction with the citizens whether challenges escalate into
crisis.”

Zooming in on this interaction, scholars analyse politicians’ direct constituent communication. Par-
ticularly, large scale real-life experiments that consist of responsiveness tests with varying treat-
ments have become fashionable (Costa, 2017). By and large, these studies draft an e-mail or a letter
with a request or a question posed by an artificial citizen to a parliamentarian or the administration.
Then, the officials’ responses are evaluated quantitatively (who answers whom how often?) and

6 The German ministries as well as the federal government’s press office received around 740.000 petitions in 2015. After

§ 17 GG a petition is slightly narrower defined than a simple inquiry. What is more, this number excludes any sort of
incomprehensive requests or spam (Deutscher Bundestag, 2016). Of these petitions, 10 percent were posed by mail, 33
percent by e-mail and 57 percent by telephone (Deutscher Bundestag, 2016). The very high share of telephone petitions
stems from the Ministry for Education and Research. Excluding this outlier, the proportions change to 13 percent by mail,
41 percent by e-mail and 46 percent by telephone (Deutscher Bundestag, 2016). Additionally, the petitions committee of
the German Bundestag counted 2.6 million active users on their platform to directly address Germany’s legislators
(Deutscher Bundestag, 2019).
7 Alizade et al. (2021) notes that it is a common practice in Germany for MP staff members to sign e-mails with “im

Auftrag” meaning that they have answered in accordance with the MP. Unfortunately, it cannot be retraced if this practice
is followed thoroughly.
8 Unfortunately, no information is available upon factional differences in dealing with citizens inquiries or the numbers

of inquiries by faction – even upon demand. Possibly, larger factions profit from more specialized teams.

qualitatively (who answers whom how?). In an international comparison, response rates to citizens
inquiries are found to be comparatively high in Germany ranging between 63 to 79 percent for
Bundestag MPs (Bol et al., 2021; Heß et al., 2018) and 79 percent for local governments (Grohs et
al., 2016).

A vivid debate evolved around the question whether parliamentarians acted strategically as ra-
tional vote share maximisers by answering selectively – rather responding to partisan than non-
partisan groups. For mainstream politicians this translates into being more responsive to the ma-
jority society and less responsive to ethnic minorities. Whereas Butler and Broockman (2011) find
that in the US politicians rather respond to a White than a Black alias, when Levine and Glick (2017)
artificially contacted public officials no such discrimination is revealed – however a lower response
rate is found regarding Hispanic names. Broockman (2013) adds that African American legislators
in the US are more responsive to African Americans even from outside their constituency. In Ger-
many, fake citizen requests with Turkish alias to local governments are not found to trigger an un-
proportionally low number of responses (Grohs et al., 2016). Although, mixed evidence is brought
forward regarding ethnically motivated discrimination of citizens’ requests, elected officials’ re-
sponse rates to ethnic minorities turn out to be significantly lower (Costa, 2017): Parliamentarians
seem to respond selectively.

Such an empirical finding contradicts a political world absent of opportunity costs, where demo-
cratically elected emotionless politicians understand their role as one of serving their constituents
and explaining political decisions truthfully, and where all requests might be answered equally and
thoroughly. In fact, such a world is not ours. Political representatives and their teams face oppor-
tunity costs, time pressure, the looming risk of not being re-elected and their individual cognitive
biases.

All these factors affect why as well as how representatives respond to citizens inquiries. Intending
to learn more about the mechanisms behind representatives’ communication behaviour, a large
body of literature focuses on the causal mechanism behind political communication and disentan-
gles intrinsic and extrinsic motivational drivers (Bénabou and Tirole, 2003). A representative is
understood to be intrinsically motivated in answering if the response is driven by their view how a
dutiful politician is supposed to behave (Norris, 1997). In line with the concept of intrinsic motiva-
tion, parliamentarians are expected to not discriminate between specific groups in the electorate.
In contrast, a representative is understood to be extrinsically motivated in answering if the response
is primarily driven by the goal to persuade voters for the next election (Cain et al., 1984). In line
with the concept of extrinsic motivation, Butler et al. (2012) compare selective answering to an
election campaign’s “microtargeting”; Bol et al. (2021) reveal higher response rates of directly
elected Bundestag MPs and if an inquiry includes a personal vote intention. While intrinsic motiva-
tion is generally found to be an important driver behind politicians’ communication behaviour, ex-
trinsic motivations often seem to dominate the decision whether a request is answered or not (de
Vries et al., 2016), crowding out intrinsic motivations (Giger et al., 2020).

In contrast to other studies that exploit the specific design of the political system to identify extrin-
sic motivation as a cause for varying response rates, the present experiment uses a topic specific
treatment and focuses on the respective variation in salience for the different parties. If only intrin-
sic motivation mattered in answering citizens inquiries, the response rate would be equal over top-
ics and independent of parties’ issue salience. If, however, as the literature stresses, extrinsic moti-
vations mattered even more, citizen request should be answered in line with the party’s issue sali-
ence. A constituent who is particularly concerned about a specific issue is easier to be convinced by
a party who has placed the respective issue as a core topic on their agenda.

H1: The higher the issue salience of the addressed politicians, the higher the responsiveness to respec-
tive citizen requests.

Once representatives or their staff decide to answer an inquiry, the question is, how do they deal
with the respective content? In an elaborately set-up experiment Grose et al. (2015) carve out the
strategical behaviour of US senators addressing their constituents. Senators are found to not explic-
itly lie, but tailor the truth in their answers depending on whether they face a partisan or an oppos-
ing letter on a highly politicized topic. Having said that, senators do not answer more often to letters
that represent their own position as would have been expected from Larson’s (1990) assumption
that politicians prefer to steer communication by setting the discussed issues and not vice versa. In
contrast to Mayhew’s (1974, p. 63) past observation that “on a controversial issue a Capitol Hill
office normally prepares two conflicting letters [(pro and con)] to send out to constituent letter
writers”, Grose et al. (2015) detect senators’ more subtle and less contradictory but equally efficient
ways to influence voters in one-to-one communication.

Again, if responsive democratic representatives followed the intrinsic idealistic conception, all re-
quests would be answered ‘neutrally’, by correcting potentially wrong facts and supplying a politi-
cal interpretation independent of the parties’ issue positioning. If extrinsic motivations mattered,
however, politicians’ toleration of ‘fake news’ should depend on the party’s issue positioning. Since
a fake fact could imply a certain topic was more pressing than it actually is, it might easily be toler-
ated following a party’s political agenda. Hence, a high ‘fake news’ toleration in line with party po-
sitioning implies a conscious, rational political behaviour intending to maximise the vote share.
Such an interpretation, however, understates the cognitive constraints that bind politicians’ intrin-
sic and rational behaviour. Based on the theory of motivated reasoning (Kunda, 1990), recent re-
search has progressed in understanding political behaviour psychologically and shown the power
of a confirmation bias (Jakobson, 2010; Knobloch-Westerwick et al., 2015; Westerwick et al., 2017).
Such a cognitive bias could also drive representatives to unconsciously ignore partisan misinfor-
mation in constituent inquiries – without being aware of tolerating fake-news (Kappes et al., 2020).
Both extrinsic vote share maximisation and confirmation bias imply a higher ‘fake news’ tolerance
in line with a party’s issue positioning.

H2: The more radical the issue positioning of the addressed politicians, the higher the fake-news tol-
erance to respective citizen requests.

3. ‘Fake news’ operationalization and research design

The fact that the interests behind the experiments outlined above is a better understanding of the
elite-electorate disconnect in times of highly polarized digital communication (Mair, 2013) makes
it surprising that the details of right-wing communication and manipulative ‘fake news’ remain in
the dark. Populist right-wing politicians regularly claim to be the true representatives of the ‘com-
mon people’ and their ‘volonté générale’ as only they speak their language (Corner, 2017; Mudde,
2007). What is more, the rise of PRRPs is often associated with certain groups that have putatively
been abandoned by the political elite – the “left-alones” who reside in “places that don’t matter”
(Rodríguez-Pose, 2018). In fact, the secular decrease in turnout9 has in parts been reversed by the
rise of PRRPs. The new political competitors have even be understood as a “corrective for democ-
racy” (Mudde and Kalwasser, 2017),10 reinforcing the pressing question of politicians’ responsive-
ness to (potential) voters. Hence, a misinformation and responsiveness experiment including the
right-wing putative representatives of the ‘true people’ to personal citizens inquiries bridges the
gap between the different strands of literature.

The major difficulty when operationalizing ‘fake news’ in an experimental setting is hidden in the
normativity of political communication. What qualifies as misinformation might not be as clearly
set as critics of ‘fake news’ might suggest. In an intent to overcome the “grey zone” (Tandoc et al.,
2018) between actual misinformation and ordinary tailoring of answers in an electoral campaign,
the present experiment is designed to quantify the topic specific spread and toleration of misinfor-
mation by party line. Therefore, the two most controversial issues of the past elections are picked
to design topic specific misinformation inquiries. Whereas the federal election of 2017 is widely
interpreted as a vote on immigration to Germany (Korte, 2019) – with the AfD winning a historically
high share of 12.7 percent – the election to the European parliament in 2019 was dominated by the
climate change issue (Kaeding et al., 2020) – with the German Green Party skyrocketing to a 20.5
percent election result. Fictional constituent inquiries are therefore drafted around these core is-
sues of recent political competition in Germany.11 Comparable to the low-cost spread of misinfor-
mation in social media, parliamentarians are simply demanded to consent (like/ share) or disagree
(dislike) with a flawed fact. In contrast to the tempting approach of picking a piece of misinfor-
mation that has already been circulated by politicians, the experiment rather employs the actual
misperception of party supporters on very general and clearly verifiable facts. To generate compa-
rable results for political extremes, an immigration vignette employs the numerical overstatement
of a negative characteristic of immigrants and a climate change vignette employs the numerical un-
derstatement of the progress in fighting climate change in Germany.

More specifically, for the immigration vignette parliamentarians are asked to evaluate the misin-
formation whether ‘actually’ 48 percent of immigrants in Germany were unemployed in line with
AfD supporters’ perception (German Economic Institute, 2020) – whereas the true value was only
14.4 percent in 2020 (Federal Employment Agency, 2021a). For the climate change vignette it is

9 See IDEA database for current data: https://www.idea.int/data-tools/question-countries-view/521/Europe/cnt
10 See Bertelsmann Stiftung (2017) for respective evidence from Germany.
11 See Appendix 2 for the three vignettes.

polled whether the current share of renewable energy of total electricity consumption in Germany
lied ‘merely’ around 35 percent in line with German Green Party supporters’ perception (German
Economic Institute, 2020) – whereas the true value increased to already 45,4 percent in 2020
(Bundesumweltamt, 2020). 12 By triggering AfD politicians to share misinformation in line with
their anti-immigration issue positioning and in line with their electorate and by triggering Green
politicians to share misinformation in line with their pro-environment positioning and their elec-
torate, the present experiment is designed to reveal the truth behind the mutual misinformation
recriminations. As a control cohort these requests are also sent to parliamentarians of all other
parties. As a control topic the Germany-wide perceived unemployment rate of 24 percent during
the current economic crisis (German Economic Institute, 2020) is sampled – whereas the official
average 2020 unemployment rate was 5.9 percent (Federal Employment Agency, 2021b).

To increase responsiveness in line with Bol et al. (2021) and Giger et al. (2020), the fictional in-
quirer pretends to be a constituent, to sympathize with the addressed politician and to offer a po-
tential vote for future elections. By stating to live in the parliamentarians’ constituency, the proba-
bility that the request is forwarded to and answered by a central representative from the faction is
reduced. Regarding the issue, however, the inquiries are designed salient but neutral (neither pro
nor con regarding the piece misinformation: “is it really true that […]”) to test politicians’ respon-
siveness and the spread of misinformation as generally as possible: The enquirer reveals to feel
insecure regarding the conflicting information that circulated in the debate on an issue and asks for
the parliamentarian’s assessment. For reasons of comparability, the empirical question refers to
the federal level. Due to the inquiries’ similarities in style, each parliamentarian receives only one
of the three vignettes.

To assess the factional differences of responsiveness and misinformation in electorate-parliamen-
tarians communication, first, a database of all German national and state parliamentarians is set-up
including their names, gender, e-mail addresses, the states where the constituencies are located as
well as their faction, faction size, government participation by faction, issue positioning, upcoming
elections in 2021 and salience by faction. Parliaments that do not offer such a list online (e.g. for
data security reasons) were contacted and finally supplied all necessary information. This renders
a complete mailing list of 709 national and 1870 state parliamentarians as of August 2020 – of
which the six major factions that can be comprehensively analysed make up 703 national and 1800
state MPs.13 Second, and comparable to Bol et al. (2021), two e-mail addresses were created con-
sisting of common German names and surnames to circumvent potential responsiveness bias in
relation to gender or ethnicity (Butler and Broockman, 2011). The common German e-mail service
t-online.de serves as an e-mail provider.

12 Comparing parliamentarians’ communication behaviour facing the different pieces of misinformation, the difference in

deviation from the actual value ( − ) is considered. This misinformation set up, however,
creates an imbalance in the issue specific degree of ‘fake news’. Whereas the immigration misinformation deviates 33.6
percentage points from the actual value, the climate change misinformation deviation lies only 10,4 percentage points
below the official statistics. Hence, an immigration ‘fake news’ toleration needs to be interpreted as more severe than one
in the climate change issue.
13 See Appendix Table 1 for a sample overview divided by factions.

The e-mails were sent to parliamentarians in two waves to spread the same e-mail content over
several days and thus avoid being detected as a fake inquiry or spam by the parliamentarians’ staff.
A third of each faction’s parliamentarians receives either an immigration, climate change or unem-
ployment related inquiry. The distribution of issues is randomized over parties and states.14 Time
spans between the waves are kept to a minimum of one week to reduce the probability of political
events that complicate comparability between the waves. To increase responsiveness, the e-mails
were sent in January 2021 avoiding parliamentarian holidays and election periods. Answers are
coded as valid if they are provided within a six-weeks period. In sum, three different treatment e-
mails (migration, climate change, unemployment) are sent by two different aliases in two separate
waves, yielding a 3 x 2 x 2 experiment set-up. This allows a robustness check to verify that the dif-
ferent alias or waves did not yield statistically different results regarding the treatment.

The experiment enables an analysis of the two dependent variables of interest. First, the share of
parliamentarians who respond to the inquiry but remain quiet on the quantitative question or ac-
tively tolerate the piece of misinformation (’fake news’ tolerator); second, the topic-related re-
sponse rate by political faction. Thus, the analysis reveals the degree of politicians’ topic specific
tolerance of misinformation in Germany. Comparing the level of misinformation with parties’ issue
positioning and salience analyses if correlations emerge by chance or follow a strategical rationale.
Moreover, an explorative screening of the answers allows a first glimpse on the qualitative nature
of narratives that are conveyed by the different parties.

Regarding Hypothesis 1 politicians of the AfD are expected to be most responsive to citizens re-
quests touching on the immigration dimension. Since immigration is a salient topic for the Green
Party as well, high response rates are also expected for representatives of the Green party. Moreo-
ver, the highest (lowest) responsiveness to citizens requests touching on the environmental dimen-
sion is expected from politicians of the Green Party (the AfD).

Regarding Hypothesis 2 it can be specified that the highest (lowest) tolerance for fake-news over-
stating immigrants’ burden for the German economy is expected for politicians of the AfD (the
Green Party). The highest (lowest) tolerance for fake-news understating the achieved progress ex-
iting fossil-fuel electricity consumption in Germany is expected for politicians of the Green Party
(the AfD).

4. Results

4.1 Responsiveness: ‘defender of the true people’ fail to live up to their own demands

Of the 2,503 addressed parliamentarians on the national and state level 1,257 (50.2 percent) pro-
vided an answer.15 The response rate of 63.6 percent for Bundestag parliamentarians lies within

14 Since faction sizes are not always a multiple of three, such a design prevents perfectly equal sized groups over immi-

gration, climate change and unemployment.
15 It must be noted that 146 parliamentarians (5.8 percent of the total sample) did not provide a qualitative answer to the

requests but offered a personal appointment (mostly by telephone) referencing to the difficulties in explaining the con-
troversial issues in a simple e-mail. In order not to waste the democratic representatives’ valuable time, such offers were

the range that has been identified by similar experiments on the national level in Germany (Bol et
al., 2021; Heß et al., 2018). The response rate on the state level turns out to be significantly lower
(44.9 percent) raising awareness for structural differences between the different federal layers.
When zooming in on the state level, evidence for extrinsically motivated response behaviour is re-
flected in higher response rates in the eight states with elections in 2021 (49.9 percent), in contrast
to a response rate of only 40.8 percent in states without upcoming elections. In general, and despite
the specificity of the requests that did not fit into most addressed parliamentarians’ issue speciali-
zation, the response rate reveals German parliamentarians’ high willingness to engage with citizens
in issue specific topics. Particularly, in an international comparison (Costa, 2017) this first piece of
evidence points to the fact that after all a lack of responsiveness might not be the driver of a putative
dealignment between politicians and citizens in Germany.

Figure 2: Response rates to fake-news query by party, in percent; source: Own depiction

Figure 2 dives deeper into the responsiveness analysis and provides an overview over response
rates by party and citizen request. First, response rates are the lowest for AfD politicians and the
overall difference to the other parties is statistically significant at least on the five percent signifi-
cance level.16 Only 39.2 percent of AfD parliamentarians provide an answer to the experiment’s cit-
izens inquiry. For every of the three different citizens requests Germany’s self-declared ‘defender
of the true people’ turn out to be less responsive than members of all other major political parties.
Also splitting the sample by Bundestag and Länder parliaments does not alter this finding.

kindly turned down. Since these politicians seemed eager to engage with citizens to exchange arguments on the contro-
versial requests, their answers were coded as not having tolerated ‘fake news’.
16 See Appendix Table 3 for a numerical overview over response rates and the chi-square test of independence of AfD

responses and those of other factions.

Regarding responsiveness, the AfD rather seems to be the cause than the saviour of the putatively
missing link between citizens and politicians.

Second, response rates are comparable between the unemployment (53.7 percent) and the climate
change (53.8 percent) query, but significantly lower for the immigration citizen request (43 per-
cent). Whereas the response rates’ ordering differs substantially for CDU/CSU, FDP, DIE LINKE and
SPD, the Greens come second last in the unemployment and immigration treatment and only man-
age to leave behind FDP parliamentarians in responsiveness to the renewable energy inquiry. Fun-
damentally, the AfD ranges far behind the other established parties. Even when being approached
by a citizen who is ‘concerned’ by immigration and shares the AfD supporters’ severe overestima-
tion of immigrants’ unemployment rate, only 36.8 percent of the populist politicians happen to pro-
vide an answer – in contrast to a 43.4 percent response rate among non-AfD politicians.17

To test the relationship between issue salience and responsiveness, Table 1 formalizes the dis-
cussed findings by providing logistic regressions with the binary response variable as the depend-
ent variable.18 As the independent variable of interest, the party specific salience in the issues envi-
ronment, immigration and economics are added respectively from the Chapel Hill Expert Survey
(2020).19 Furthermore, on the individual level, the regressions control for Bundestag affiliation and
gender. On the party-state-level, the regressions control for government participation and faction
size as well as for scheduled elections in 2021.20 Standard errors are clustered on the state level.
Hypothesis 1 follows the rationale that parliamentarians are more willing to engage in their party’s
core issue. Hence, the highest response rate to the immigration request – that is based on a piece of
misinformation circulation among AfD supporters – is expected from the AfD. The highest response
rate to the climate change issue – that is based on a piece of misinformation circulation among
Green Party supporters – is expected from the Green Party.21 Figure 2 reveals that this is not the
case. AfD politicians rather turn out to be less responsive than parliamentarians of established par-
ties – independent of the issue treatment. Table 1 shows that ceteris paribus no general relationship
between party specific issue salience and response rates can be carved out for the overall party
system. In all three citizen requests there is no statistically significant relationship between issue
salience and responsiveness. In contrast, national parliamentarians are more responsive than their
state level counterparts. Furthermore, an election year goes along with higher responsiveness in
the climate change issue. Finally, Column 4 reveals that taken together and ceteris paribus the low
responsiveness of AfD parliamentarians is not statistically significant beyond the control variables.
In fact, AfD politicians are less often national than state parliamentarians, they do not form any

17 Although these differences appear to be large and the AfD always ranges on the responsiveness hierarchy’s last place,

it needs to be noted that differences are not statistically significant for the immigration inquiry (see Appendix Table 3).
18 See Appendix Table 2 for the summary statistics of all variables employed in the regression models.
19 For the following regressions it needs to be noted that variables on issue specific salience and positioning extracted

from the Chapel Hill Expert Survey are defined on the party level and AfD as well as the Green Party hold the extreme
positions in most political cleavages. To exploit the full variance of these variables, party fixed effects are excluded from
the issue specific regressions and only added to the model in column 4 that contains the entire sample. All additional
model specifications with party fixed effects are available upon request.
20 Since the experiment did not reveal significant differences between Eastern and Western Germany, a respective dummy

variable is excluded from the regressions.
21 Consult Figure 1 for an overview over party issue positioning and salience.

government and their factions are smaller in size than those of other parties – characteristics that
show significant positive correlations with responsiveness in bivariate regressions. Hence, the
AfD’s responsiveness is the lowest, but the differences to established parties are at least partly ex-
plained by party’s peculiar characteristics.

 Unemployment Climate Change Immigration Total

 salience economics 0.094
 (0.092)
 salience environment 0.011
 (0.090)
 salience immigration -0.065
 (0.065)
 Bundestag = 1 0.775** 0.887*** 0.743* 0.849***
 (0.311) (0.198) (0.433) (0.261)
 government = 1 0.132 0.527* 0.119 0.194
 (0.326) (0.295) (0.333) (0.295)
 state election = 1 0.208 0.472** 0.248 0.311
 (0.300) (0.238) (0.364) (0.270)
 female = 1 -0.083 0.006 -0.103 -0.090
 (0.120) (0.132) (0.195) (0.070)
 faction size 0.001 -0.000 0.002 0.001
 (0.003) (0.002) (0.003) (0.002)
 AfD = 1 -0.418
 (0.255)
 Gruene = 1 -0.092
 (0.265)
 Constant -0.889 -0.636 -0.259 -0.399
 (0.685) (0.548) (0.592) (0.277)

 Observations 806 838 859 2,503
 Adjusted R-squared 0.0331 0.0329 0.0303 0.0312
Table 1: Logistic regression models: response rate; robust standard errors in parentheses, clustered at Länder
level; *** p

official data and include the respective source. However, even when ignoring ‘fake news’ toleration,
the answers by AfD politicians stand out as an extreme for every citizen inquiry. Whereas parlia-
mentarians (who contest the ‘fake news’) of all parties on average manage to correctly specify the
unemployment rate, the AfD provides a number of 6.6 percent which is ten percent higher than the
official number of 5.9 percent in 2020. What is more, AfD politicians (who contest the ‘fake news’)
play down the share of renewable energy (43.3 percent) that spiked to 45.4 percent of German
energy consumption. And they numerically report a 23 percent too high unemployment rate of im-
migrants (17.8 percent) although a quick internet search reveals the official number of 14.5 per-
cent.22

Figure 3: Numerical deviation from official value, by party, in percent23; source: Own depiction

The descriptive results confirm the intuition that AfD politicians depict whichever issue they are
being approached with as more severe than it is. In our example this means that AfD parliamentar-
ians (if providing a numerical answer to a piece of misinformation) still state the unemployment
was higher than it actually is, the share of renewable energy in the German energy consumption
was lower than it actually is and the unemployment rate of immigrants was higher than it actually
is. The findings fit into the notion of a post-truthism that is fundamentally driven by the populist
radical right. In this spirit, an AfD politician answers “the unadorned unemployment rate lays at 10
percent” (own translation). Another AfD parliamentarian states the unemployment rate had “in-
creased to 10-12 percent – depending on the version” (own translation). Asked for the

22 See Appendix Table 4 for an overview over party specific numerical answers and bivariate t-tests between answers
from the AfD and other parties. For the citizens requests on unemployment and immigration most parties’ responses are
statistically significant closer to the official number than those of the AfD.
23 See Appendix Figure 1a-c for box plots of the answer’s numerical deviation from official statistics.

unemployment rate among immigrants a party comrade suggests: “I arrive at a share of 1/3 –
rounded – or 29.4 percent – calculated” (own translation). Even for easily falsifiable information
several AfD politicians do not care enough to supply the numerically correct information.

Nevertheless, no such behaviour – possibly following an extrinsic motivation – can be revealed for
the PRRPs’ political antagonists, the Greens. The party does not even stand out in their numerical
answers to the climate change inquiry. The OLS regressions in Table 2 also qualify the descriptive
evidence of the AfD as an outlier. Neither can a general relationship between numerical answers
and party specific issue positioning be revealed nor do AfD parliamentarians’ deviations remain
statistically significant ceteris paribus. Also, most control variables do not provide statistically sig-
nificant effects on the numerical answers: If parliamentarians decided to contest ‘fake news’ nu-
merically, they rather provide the true answers.

 Unemployment Climate Change Immigration Total†

 positioning economics 0.028
 (0.019)
 positioning environment -0.082
 (0.157)
 positioning immigration 0.286*
 (0.156)
 Bundestag = 1 0.071 1.736** -0.270 0.146
 (0.098) (0.791) (0.826) (0.308)
 government = 1 -0.138 1.061 -0.992 -0.315
 (0.110) (0.768) (0.742) (0.311)
 state election = 1 0.238* 0.098 -0.780 0.257
 (0.124) (0.981) (0.542) (0.280)
 female = 1 -0.037 -0.798** 0.194 -0.254
 (0.047) (0.307) (0.471) (0.168)
 faction size 0.000 -0.017*** -0.004 -0.001
 (0.001) (0.006) (0.004) (0.002)
 AfD = 1 0.902
 (0.663)
 Gruene = 1 -0.079
 (0.148)
 Constant -0.057 0.262 0.018 1.809***
 (0.132) (1.102) (1.041) (0.347)

 Observations 358 347 245 950
 R-squared 0.038 0.026 0.054 0.015
 Adjusted R-squared 0.0220 0.00929 0.0304 0.00766
Table 2: OLS regression models: numerical deviation from official value; robust standard errors in parentheses,
clustered at Länder level; *** p

A first qualitative screening of the answers provided strengthens this interpretation. Not only does
a great majority provide official statistics, quotes reliable sources, inserts links to websites or at-
taches further material. Except for the AfD, most responses are also calm, helpful, understanding,
and professional. Of course, also non-AfD politicians follow a political agenda. To stress their argu-
ment, they also criticize or propose current policies: Interestingly, when being confronted with a
putatively high unemployment number for immigrants, several parliamentarians of established
parties refer to the BioNTech founders as a story of economically successful integration: “The sci-
entific heads behind the first available Corona vaccine, the BioNTech-heads Özlem Türeci and Ugur
Sahin have a so-called migration background” (own translation). To persuade a possibly critical
citizen, they do not only supply numerical evidence but also a suitable narration to their (pro-im-
migration) positioning.

4.3 ‘Fake news’ toleration: post-truthism exclusively on the political right

The small differences of numerical answers between the AfD and the other parties also result from
ignoring the fake-news toleration in this metric. A citizen request is coded to have tolerated fake
news if it either explicitly consents with the misinformation or if it simply ignores them in their
answer. The slightest notion of contest or an alternative numerical answer disqualifies from being
coded as ‘fake news’ toleration. This even holds for an AfD politician who states that the unemploy-
ment rate “cannot be defined correctly right now”. Hence, the ‘fake news’ toleration rates discussed
below represent the very conservative lower bound of uncontested ‘fake news’.

Figure 4: Fake-news toleration rate, by party; source: Own depiction

Impressively, Figure 4 reveals the inequality of ‘fake news’ tolerance between parties. Not only do
AfD politicians structurally overstate problems numerically, but they also happen to tolerate ‘fake
news’ much more frequently. Whereas one third of AfD parliamentarians failed to contest the pieces
of misinformation spread out to them, the share for established parties’ politicians lies around
merely five percent. Social democratic politicians turn out to be most resilient to ‘fake news’: Only
seven of the 315 SPD respondents tolerate ‘fake news’. Hypothesis 2 claiming that parties on both
political ends tend to be issue specifically consumed by extrinsic motivation to tolerate ‘fake news’
has to be rejected. Again, particularly the Green Party proves a high degree of ‘fake news’ resilience
even in their core topic. In contrast to underplaying the development of renewable energy in Ger-
many in line with their supporters’ views, 93.1 percent of Green parliamentarians contest the cli-
mate change piece of misinformation. Hence, on a quantitative and qualitative basis the AfD’s accu-
sation of the Greens as “hysterical climate-crisis screeching” (own translation, Frindte and Frindte,
2020) must be rejected. On the very other end, nearly half of AfD parliamentarians tolerates or even
reinforces the misinformation that the unemployment rate of immigrants ranged around 48 per-
cent – as stated by their supporters.24 What is more, a qualitative difference exists among tolerators
of misinformation. E-mail responses from AfD ‘fake news’ tolerators are written aggressively in
style. Irrespective of the topic, they build a doomsday narrative of the German society and the econ-
omy and actively deceive citizens not to believe in official statistics. Tolerating the climate change
misinformation, an AfD politician claims: “A friend of mine is employed at a large electricity sup-
plier. Due to the situation in 2020, we have been facing a black out multiple times” (own transla-
tion). Another one calls for trust in God to overcome the climate crisis. Actively undermining confi-
dence in official statistics, an AfD parliamentarian points to a betrayal of ‘the people’ when he names
the immigrants unemployment rate “one of the best kept secrets that from our knowledge is not
even grasped statistically” (own translation). Or: “Finally, ‘the politics’ doesn’t want to evaluate it”
(quotation marks in original, own translation). The AfD adds fuel to whichever flames might be di-
rected at established institutions and parties.

Finally, Table 3 provides logistic regression models with the individual ‘fake news’ toleration vari-
able as the dependent variable and issue positioning as the independent variable of interest. Eco-
nomically, more right-wing parties turn out to have a higher chance to tolerate negative ‘fake news’
when it comes to the labour market. This surprising result is to a certain degree driven by the fact
that CHES experts still judge the AfD economically between CDU/CSU and FDP. Excluding the AfD
from the sample, the effect of economic positioning on ‘fake news’ toleration in the unemployment
query becomes statistically insignificant. Also, for the immigration citizen request, the regressions
confirm the descriptive evidence, namely that more right-wing (anti-immigration) positioned par-
ties rather tend to tolerate negative ‘fake news’ on the matter.25 The respective relationship turns
out to be statistically significant only on the ten percent significance level for the climate change

24 See Appendix Table 5 for an overview over ‘fake news’ toleration rates and the chi-square test of independence of AfD

responses and those of other factions.
25 A qualitative analysis shows that several politicians of established parties confuse the share of immigrants that is un-

employed with the much higher share of immigrants among the unemployed. The lion share of ‘fake news’ toleration
among non-AfD parliamentarians in the immigration inquiry goes back to referencing to the latter and confirming the
piece of misinformation that ranges around a similar number.