Looking Up Political Knowledge Online: Is It Competence or Cheating?

• In Event: How Citizen Political Knowledge and Patience Matter

Abstract

Political Knowledge is a workhorse variable in American politics that is positively associated with any number of democracy-enhancing indicators. Typically measured as a count of correct responses to factual open- and closed-ended questions about politics, this measure has recently lost some of its measurement validity because surveys are now routinely conducted online and without supervision, and respondents sometimes use the internet to search for the answers to political knowledge questions. Some scholars have argued that this behavior amounts to ‘cheating’ and distorts political knowledge measures. Others, however, contend that finding information on the internet is not really cheating but instead, should be viewed as yet another form of political competence. In this paper, we try to make some headway in this debate by manipulating the cognitive complexity required to answer traditional ANES-style political knowledge questions, and whether respondents are encouraged to use the internet to find the answers. We consider standard measures of political competence, and introduce a new measure of decision-making quality.

Authors

• Mona S. Kleinberg, CUNY - Queens College

• Amy Funck, Rutgers University, New Brunswick

• Richard R. Lau, Rutgers University, New Brunswick