Editorial: 2023 Best Paper Award

This year, the Journal of Economics and Statistics is awarding the prize for the best paper of a volume for the second time. We are grateful to our publisher De Gruyter for supporting the prize with 500 euros. The editorial board selected the award-winning article based on a short list from Michael Frenkel (WHU), Susanne Prantl (University of Cologne) and Nicolas Ziebarth (ZEW).

The 2023 Best Paper Award goes to

“Political Ignorance and the Internet”

by Irene Bertschek (Justus-Liebig-University Gießen) and David F. Müller (University of Mannheim), published in volume 243(1), 3–28.

The paper studies the relationship between Internet usage and political ignorance. The research question is whether Internet use contributes to people being better politically informed or whether Internet use makes people politically ignorant. The authors construct a new index of people’s level of indifference with respect to political topics and feature it to measure political ignorance. The analysis uses several surveys conducted from 2001 to 2004, in 2010, and in 2014. Overall, their dataset comprises more than 108,000 observations and the respondents are representative of the German electorate.

The paper shows a negative correlation between Internet use and political ignorance in the early years of the survey period. In later years, the sign is reversed, so that higher Internet usage is associated with higher political ignorance. According to the authors, the findings support the view that, in the early years of the Internet, more information contributed to users being better informed and less politically ignorant. By contrast, more recently, the increasing amount of information has led to an information overload letting Internet users ignore information and pushing them towards political ignorance. However, the authors also discuss other possible explanations for the reversal of the link between Internet usage and political ignorance.

The paper makes an original contribution on the role of the Internet for information provision and political participation. It addresses a very timely topic in times of increasing political polarization. The finding that Internet users have become politically more ignorant over time should stimulate further research.

Congratulations to the authors for this best paper award!