Political Knowledge

Political knowledge has long been considered an integral part of public opinion, as well as a topic of survey research interest in its own right for many decades. While many definitions of political knowledge exist, most reflect an understanding of it as factual information about politics and government that individuals retain in their memory.

Political knowledge is similar to, but somewhat narrower than, “political awareness,” “political sophistication,” or “political expertise.” Political knowledge is an important source of the considerations people draw upon when asked to respond to an attitude or opinion question and is thus an integral aspect of many theories of public opinion formation and change. It also is a key concept in democratic theory, with scholars and philosophers since the time of Plato debating whether the public knows, or could know, enough to play an appropriate role in the governance of a society.

Political knowledge is typically measured in surveys with questions asking respondents to recall specifie facts or to recognize names or events. There also are questions asking respondents to rate their own level of knowledge, either in general or on specifie subjects. Related to these are questions that ask whether the respondent has heard or read anything about an event, person, or issue. Another type of measure is an interviewer rating of the respondent's level of knowledge. In the absence of these kinds of measures, researchers sometimes use other surrogates, such as level of formal education. While such surrogates may be correlated with political knowledge, they have significant limitations.

Knowledge questions began appearing on national surveys soon after the invention of the modern sample survey. One of the oldest knowledge questions appearing in the Roper Center's comprehensive database of survey questions is a January 1937 item that asked a national Gallup poll sample, In your estimation, how much is the national debt today! Soon thereafter, Gallup was regularly including knowledge questions on its national polls. Other survey organizations, including some located in government agencies, began asking knowledge questions in the late 1930s.

Despite the long interest by survey researchers in the concept, there was little sustained scholarly attention to the measurement of knowledge until the 1980s. Vincent Price's 1999 review of the topic for a major handbook on the measurement of political attitudes notes that the 1968 edition of the handbook identified only four developed scales, with limited evidence of reliability and validity. By 1999, there was an increased interest in political knowledge.

Most research finds that overall levels of political knowledge held by the public are quite low. Political scientist Philip E. Converse succinctly summed up a vast body of literature when he noted that the variance in political information is very high although the mean level is very low. There is no consensus among scholars as to how much knowledge the public needs to function effectively in a democratic system, but there is agreement that much of the public lacks adequate knowledge to participate effectively. Research has found that there has been relatively little change over time in the overall levels of knowledge held by the public, despite increases in education and changes in the mass media environment that arguably could have raised knowledge levels.

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