The Quality of Political Information

Abstract

The article conceptualizes the quality of political information and shows how the concept can be used for empirical research. I distinguish three aspects of quality (intelligibility, relevance, and validity) and use them to judge the constituent foundations of political information, that is, component claims (statements of alleged facts) and connection claims (argumentative statements created by causally linking two component claims). The resulting conceptual map thus entails six manifestations of information quality (component claim intelligibility, connection claim intelligibility, component claim relevance, connection claim relevance, component claim validity, and connection claim validity). I explain how the conceptual map can be used to make sense of the eclectic variety of existing research, and how it can advance new empirical research, as a guide for determining variation in information quality, as a conceptual template for the analysis of different types of political messages and their common quality deficiencies, and as a generator of new research questions and theoretical expectations.