Misinformation and the 2010 Election – A Study of the US Electorate, December 10, 2010, by Clay Ramsay, Steven Kull, Evan Lewis, of WorldPublicOpinion.org (WPO), an international collaborative project, managed by the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland, with the aim of giving voice to public opinion around the world on international issues.
“The midterm Federal election of 2010 was the first to be conducted in the wake of the Supreme Court decision in the case of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. This decision struck down a provision of the McCain-Feingold election law which had prohibited corporations and unions from paying for the broadcast of election-related communications that named a candidate within 30 days of a primary or 60 days of a general election. This controversial decision freed corporations and unions to spend unlimited amounts of money on what was called electioneering communications. A controversial feature of this decision was that spending was to occur outside the contributions to the campaigns of candidates, and thus the campaigns were not accountable for the veracity of claims made in such communications. The week after the election was thus a propitious time to survey the American public. Americans had been bombarded with every conceivable type of information, argument and persuasion for months, a barrage certainly unprecedented for a non-presidential election year. A goal of the study was to determine whether Americans perceived that the information in this new environment was reliable, or whether they perceived a high level of misinformation. In addition, another goal was to assess the quality of the information in the election environment by asking a wide range of questions on issues that were prominent in the campaign and determining whether, and to what degree, voters were misinformed on these issues.”
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