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This is for entertainment, not a scientific measure of honesty. Who Lies More?
No study we found can say which party lies more, because none records every claim each party makes. What research can show is how fact-checkers choose and rate the claims they do check, and how people on both sides judge falsehoods from their own party and from the other one.
Fact-checkers cannot check every claim, so they choose. A 2019 review of fact-checking research in Political Studies Review describes choosing the claim as the first of five steps, drawing on Lucas Graves's field study of US fact-checkers. Joseph Uscinski and Ryden Butler (Critical Review, 2013) object to rating a statement that holds several facts as if it were one fact, and to rating predictions about events that have not happened yet. The review sums up their wider complaint: claims are picked with no systematic method, which the reviewers say risks a false impression of a politician's honesty. Defenders answer that the purpose of fact-checking is not to establish who lies most but to inform people about claims made in public.
Fact-checkers do not always agree, either. Comparing PolitiFact and The Washington Post's Fact Checker, Chloe Lim (Research & Politics, 2018) found that only one in 10 statements had been checked by both. On those, the two agreed fairly well on outright falsehoods and obvious truths, and much less often on claims in the ambiguous middle of their scales, such as "Half True" or "Mostly False". A 2015 study in The Forum of three major US fact-check sites pointed to substantial differences in the questions they asked and the answers they gave on three disputed topics. The 2019 review calls the evidence on consistency mixed, because other studies found different fact-checkers broadly consistent.
A 2019 meta-analysis by Peter Ditto and colleagues in Perspectives on Psychological Science pooled 51 experiments with more than 18,000 participants. Liberals and conservatives both judged otherwise identical information more favourably when it supported their side, and the study found no difference in how strongly each side did it on average. The authors place the result in a continuing debate among psychologists over whether that bias is equal on both sides.
Partisans can also go easier on their own side's falsehoods. In a set of studies by Jeff Galak and Clayton Critcher in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (2023), Republicans and Democrats alike judged falsehoods by their own party's politicians, once the media had flagged them, as more acceptable, most of all falsehoods meant to advance the party's agenda. Deciding what counts as a lie may be less partisan than people expect: in two preregistered experiments with 1,040 people, Louisa Reins and Alex Wiegmann (Social Psychological and Personality Science, 2024) found partisans' judgments of whether a political falsehood was a lie were only weakly affected by the speaker's party, though they expected their opponents' judgments to be strongly affected.
In a Pew Research Center survey published in 2022, majorities in both parties said people in the other party are more dishonest than other Americans. Six years earlier, fewer than half in each party had said so.
These studies describe how fact-checkers work and how people judge claims in experiments and surveys. They do not measure the honesty of any one politician or voter, and neither does this page. It is a paid poll for entertainment: every vote costs 99¢, only paid votes count, and the chart shows how paying voters split.
Sources checked October 2026.
No study we found can settle it. Comparisons between the parties often rely on fact-checkers' ratings, which cover only the claims the checkers chose to check, and different checkers do not always agree. In experiments, people on both sides also judged information more kindly when it suited their side. This page does not answer it either: the chart shows only how paying voters split, for entertainment.
Lies often go undiscovered, so politicians' honesty is hard to study. In one 2020 study in PNAS, 816 Spanish mayors were told they would get a personalised report of the survey's results only if a private coin flip came up heads. Nearly 68% reported heads, against the 50% expected if everyone told the truth, which the authors read as a large share lying for a non-cash reward. A politician's own side may also forgive some lies: in the studies by Galak and Critcher, falsehoods told to advance a party's agenda signalled that a politician could be trusted by their own side, and among partisans on that side, this sense of trust went with seeing the politician as more moral.
They have to choose, because no one can check every claim, and critics question that first step. In Lucas Graves's field study of US fact-checkers, as the 2019 review above summarises it, a check has five steps: choosing claims to check, contacting the person who made the claim, tracing false claims, consulting experts and sources, and publishing the check as transparently as possible. Critics such as Uscinski and Butler argue that without a systematic way of choosing claims the findings are less reliable, and the review adds that this risks a false impression of how honest a politician is.
Researchers have not settled it. The 2019 review found it disputed whether fact-checkers are consistent in their conclusions and whether their methods are reliable. In Chloe Lim's 2018 comparison, two major US fact-checkers rarely checked the same statements, agreed fairly well on outright falsehoods and obvious truths, and disagreed more often on ambiguous claims, particularly when politicians worded a claim to be ambiguous.
Somewhat. A meta-analysis of 30 studies with 20,963 participants by Walter, Cohen, Holbert and Morag (Political Communication, 2020) found fact-checks had a positive effect overall in correcting political misinformation. The effect was weaker when a fact-check used a "truth scale" or refuted only part of a claim, and people's existing beliefs, ideology and knowledge substantially weakened it.
No. WhoLiesMore is a paid opinion poll for entertainment, not a survey and not an election. People choose to take part, it does not measure anyone's honesty, and the chart shows only how paying voters split.
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