Partisan Processing: How positive and negative partisan identities affect susceptibility to misinformation in African democracies

ABSTRACT The role of affective partisan identities in African democracies remains understudied, particularly with respect to how they condition information processing. However, evidence from elsewhere suggests that derived biases in the acquisition, processing, and recall of information shape the formation of attitudes, political behavior, and the aggregate health of a democracy. In a survey experiment in Ghana (N = 2,200), we study how positive and negative partisan identities condition the vulnerability of voters to misinformation and their degree of endorsement of congenial, discordant, and nonpolitical information, both true and false. Our findings will shed light on the wide-reaching effects of the psychological salience of group identities and the emotional schema they carry, identifying the nature of bias in the evaluation of both political and nonpolitical information. Furthermore, we will contribute (to our knowledge) the first experimental evidence on the respective cognitive effects of positive and negative partisan identities (across any global region), highlighting the potentially complex and divergent roles of affective identities in drawing voters into electoral politics.