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Cheryl Boudreau, Arthur Lupia

Cambridge Handbook of Experimental Political Science

310

12. Political Knowledge Page 321 310 12. Political Knowledge Cheryl Boudreau and Arthur Lupia i In many political surveys, many citizens fail to answer, or provide incorrect answers to, fact-based questions about political figures and institutions. A common inference drawn from such failures is that citizens’ poor performance on surveys reflects their incompetence in democratically meaningful contexts such as voting booths. The scholarly home for such findings is the academic literature on political knowledge. A common analytic definition of political knowledge is that it is a measure of a citizen's ability to provide correct answers to a specific set of fact-based questions. ii Typical political knowledge questions include “What is the political office held by [name of current vice president, British prime minister, or Chief Justice of the United States]?” and “Which political party has the most seats in the US House of …