The Politics of Evidence Selection

Debates about how politicians handle evidence typically emphasize interpretation rather than selection. We shift attention to this earlier and often hidden stage and argue that partisan perspectives shape which evidence politicians attend to. We test this claim in a real-world field setting during the 2024 Austrian parliamentary election campaign. Three weeks before election day, we sent 1,822 candidates links to two high-quality research briefings on the same immigration reform and tracked which evidence they selected. Partisan-aligned selection is concentrated among extreme parties: far-right Freedom Party candidates disproportionately choose aligned evidence, while centrists show more balanced patterns. A contemporaneous survey of citizens shows that far-right supporters approve of elites’ selective attention to evidence, highlighting alignment between elite behavior and mass preferences. These results identify evidence selection as a key stage in policymaking and suggest that rising far-right strength may amplify reliance on supportive information, increasing the risk of ill-informed policy.