Political Knowledge

Political knowledge is considered to be among the most important determinants of citizens' competence to govern in a representative democracy. The concept is used to indicate anything in the broad spectrum from information awareness to confident understanding of politics that may enable citizens to vote, cast a vote that accurately reflects their views on important public issues, and engage in other activities that affect government. Classically, knowledge has been defined as a belief that can be justified as true. There are deep philosophical debates about whether only what is evident is true, as René Descartes (1596–1650) proposed, or true is any idea that is successfully used in action to solve problems, as John Dewey (1859–1952) suggested. Generally, the meaning of the concept emerges only from the practical purposes of its users. Therefore, in the American National Election Studies (ANES), the largest, most influential and widely used sample survey research project investigating voting behavior, political [Page 594]knowledge has been defined since the 1950s as the amount of information that citizens remember about various public figures and institutions. Specifically, during the 2004 U.S. presidential election, ANES asked citizens to identify the speaker of the House of Representatives, vice president of the United States, prime minister of England, chief justice of the Supreme Court, and majority parties in Congress.

The ANES definition implies three main assumptions about political knowledge. First, it is information useful for voting; second, it is dependent on media use; and third, it consists of discrete facts. Although empirical research over the past 50 years has consistently supported those assumptions and has shown that ANES questions measure what they measure quite well, the question still remains of the true nature or meaning of what is being measured. The starting point for explicating the concept of political knowledge is to ask questions that may broaden the ANES assumptions: What are the purposes for which democratic citizens use knowledge? What constitutes useful knowledge? What are the sources of useful knowledge?