What Citizens Know Depends on How You Ask Them: Political Knowledge and Political Learning Skills

Arthur Lupia and Markus Prior

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: Surveys provide widely-cited measures of political knowledge. Do unusual aspects of survey interviews reduce their relevance? To address this question, we embedded a set of experiments in a representative survey of over 1200 Americans. A control group answered political knowledge questions in a typical survey context. Respondents in treatment groups received the same questions in different contexts. One group received a monetary incentive for answering questions correctly. Others were given more time to answer the questions. The treatments increase the number of correct answers by 11-24 percent. Our findings imply that conventional knowledge measures confound respondents’ recall of political information and their motivation to engage the survey question. The measures also provide unreliable assessments of respondents’ abilities to access information that they have stored in places other than their immediately available memories. As a result, existing knowledge measures likely underestimate peoples’ capacities for informed decision making.

Keywords: political knowledge; economic knowledge; experimental economics; incentives; survey (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C90 H30 H31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2005, Revised 2006-09-25
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-cdm, nep-exp, nep-knm, nep-pbe, nep-pol and nep-soc
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:103

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