Description
Despite the numerous conceptualisations of post-truth, a gap in literature remains with regards to empirically illustrating it. I introduce the ‘post-truth’ as a discourse, drawing from the psychoanalytic elements of lack and fantasy along with the fantasmatic logic of explanation, to identify and measure it. In this framework, emotionality is necessary to structure lack and fantasy, and a ‘post-truth’ discourse embodies lack, fantasy, and emotionality, co-occurring to present a fantasmatic logic. I test the ‘post-truth’ discourse to Pakistan in a two-step design. First, I employ a qualitative text analysis to national newspaper articles to detect ‘post-truth’ accounts. Based on this categorization, I design a vignette survey experiment to test the causal relationship between ‘post-truth’ narratives and truthfulness. I surveyed a random sample of 800 respondents from five urban districts in Pakistan. I find that the persuasiveness of post-truth narratives varies across issues but the impact of trust in the source is constant. I also report that trust is mostly associated to politicians than political columnists. Despite an overall null results are present, I highlight how the correlation between emotions and truthfulness for a ‘post-truth’ discourse paves the way to further study the interplay between emotions and political support.
