Blurred Authorities: How Exposure to Conflicting Accounts Increases Strong Democrats’ Openness to Partisan Conspiracy Narratives

Abstract

Existing research has demonstrated that Republicans are more likely than Democrats to engage with online political disinformation that traffics in partisan conspiracies. However, little is known about why this asymmetry exists. This study proposes that exposure to conflicting accounts from conflicting authorities in a given knowledge domain is an under-appreciated mechanism that increases susceptibility to partisan conspiracies and helps drive such asymmetries. To examine this question, I test two pre-registered hypotheses using two survey experiments on Amazon Cloud Research. In experiment 1, Republicans were more open to conspiracies at baseline but exposure to conflicting accounts made strong Democrats more open, eliminating this gap. In experiment 2, the effect of exposure to conflicting accounts is weaker but still contributed to closing the partisan gap, while Democrats’(but not Republicans’) self-reported media consumption heavily moderated the effect of exposure to conflicting accounts on belief. Implications of these findings are discussed for research on political polarization and disinformation as well as non-political knowledge domains.