Applied Political Knowledge: A New Scale Measuring Political Competence

• In Event: Information and Political Knowledge

Abstract

Political knowledge is one of the most important and widely-used concepts in political behavior research. It is traditionally defined as knowledge held in long-term memory, and is measured as a count of correct responses to factual questions about political institutions, people, and processes. It strongly predicts any number of democracy-enhancing beliefs and behaviors such as stability of political opinions, ideological constraint, political tolerance, interest in political campaigns, turnout and other types of political participation, and correct voting.

However, traditional political knowledge questions have been challenged in the past few years. Some scholars criticize the specific knowledge that is typically measured on standard political knowledge scales – what possible value could knowing who the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court is, or who the Prime Minister of Great Britain is, provide to ordinary citizens in a democracy? Others argue that the questions asked on political knowledge batteries are a stand-in for some broader political sophistication and civic competence. The growth of online polling has posed another serious challenge to the measurement of political knowledge, as respondents can now easily look up the answers to most political knowledge questions, undermining the predictive validity of the scale.

In this paper, we introduce a new measure of practical or applied political decision-making ability that is comprised of items that (a) more directly measure the information and skills that citizens need to make competent decisions, and (b) cannot easily be answered with internet searches. Questions tap the ability to make hypothetical value-maximizing multi-attribute decisions; knowledge of the typical policy views of Democrats and Republicans; knowledge of the policy orientation of common well-known special interest groups (such as the ACLU, AARP, NAACP, NRA); avoiding simplistic black and white thinking, and common decision making heuristic mistakes such as honoring sunk costs, and falling prey to framing effects; cognitive reflection; basic numeracy, plus an understanding of probability; and knowledge of federalism, and the level of government that can help solve common problems often faced by everyday citizens, and avoidance of over- (and under-) confidence in the amount of political knowledge one actually has.

As described more fully below, we developed measures of 11 distinct concepts that theoretically should contribute to decision making competence, and administered them to a nationally representative sample of 1000 respondents on the 2022 CES survey. Analysis will focus on the measurement properties of these new items, and the establishment of construct validity for the new measure. Is there sufficient variance in the proportion of correct answers to the different items? Do the various subscales correlate positively with each other? Ultimately we hypothesize that this new scale will better predict the types of attitudes and behaviors competence citizens should hold than standard measures of general political knowledge.

Authors

• Richard R. Lau, Rutgers University, New Brunswick

• Mona S. Kleinberg, CUNY - Queens College

• Amy Funck, Rutgers University, New Brunswick