Thinking twice? How language shapes what voters remember

Abstract

Bilinguals represent a growing share of the electorate in many established democracies, yet we still know little about how language shapes the processing of political information. We ask whether the language in which citizens encounter political information shapes what they remember and whether it moderates the partisan biases governing recollection. Secondary-language processing may disrupt motivated reasoning by encouraging effortful evaluation, or deplete the resources needed to resist it. In a preregistered experiment, English-French bilinguals in Canada (N = 765) were randomly assigned to read pro- and anti-immigration arguments in their primary or secondary language before completing a recognition task. We find that secondary-language processing more than halves the congeniality gap in inferential memory, driven by a reduction in belief-consistent flawed memories. The findings identify language of processing as a moderator of partisan memory and demonstrate that linguistic context can disrupt the belief-consistent inferences through which political information becomes distorted in memory.

Yara Sleiman

Postdoctoral Fellow

My research is on how democratic participation is shaped by political cross-pressures, situations where voters are subjected to conflicting influences that affect their political preferences.