Bankrupt Rhetoric: How Misleading Information Affects Knowledge about Social Security

Most citizens know little about politics. Scholars often attribute political ignorance to individual-level factors, but we concentrate on the quality of the information environment. Employing a combination of experimental methods and content analysis, we code statements from the 1998–99 debate over Social Security reform as either misleading or not misleading. Then, using surveys conducted during the debate, we examine the impact of individual- and environmental-level variables on political knowledge about the program’s future. We show that misleading statements about Social Security’s future cause some citizens to get an important fact about the program wrong. More precisely, many citizens mistakenly believe that Social Security will run out of money because political elites occasionally use words that lead to overly pessimistic assessments of the program’s financial future. Our findings have important implications for policymakers who are attempting to remake America’s largest federal program, scholars who study citizen competence, and citizens in a representative democracy.