Citizens, Knowledge, and the Information Environment

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2006

Journal/Book Title/Conference

American Journal of Political Science

Volume

50

Issue

2

Publisher

Wiley-Blackwell

First Page

266

Last Page

282

Abstract

In a democracy, knowledge is power. Research explaining the determinants of knowledge focuses on unchanging demographic and socioeconomic characteristics. This study combines data on the public’s knowledge of nearly 50 political issues with media coverage of those topics. In a two-part analysis, we demonstrate how education, the strongest and most consistent predictor of political knowledge, has a more nuanced connection to learning than is commonly recognized. Sometimes education is positively related to knowledge. In other instances its effect is negligible. A substantial part of the variation in the education-knowledge relationship is due to the amount of information available in the mass media. This study is among the first to distinguish the short-term, aggregate-level influences on political knowledge from the largely static individual-level predictors and to empirically demonstrate the importance of the information environment.

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Originally published by Wiley-Blackwell. Publisher's PDF and HTML fulltext available through remote link.

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