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

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  • Lupia, Arthur
  • Prior, Markus

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.

Suggested Citation

  • Lupia, Arthur & Prior, Markus, 2005. "What Citizens Know Depends on How You Ask Them: Political Knowledge and Political Learning Skills," MPRA Paper 103, University Library of Munich, Germany, revised 25 Sep 2006.
    • Handle: RePEc:pra:mprapa:103
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    File URL: https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/103/1/MPRA_paper_103.pdf
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    1. Krupnikov, Yanna & Levine, Adam Seth & Lupia, Arthur & Prior, Markus, 2006. "Public Ignorance and Estate Tax Repeal: The Effect of Partisan Differences and Survey Incentives," National Tax Journal, National Tax Association;National Tax Journal, vol. 59(3), pages 425-437, September.

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    political knowledge; economic knowledge; experimental economics; incentives; survey;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • H30 - Public Economics - - Fiscal Policies and Behavior of Economic Agents - - - General
    • H31 - Public Economics - - Fiscal Policies and Behavior of Economic Agents - - - Household
    • C90 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Design of Experiments - - - General

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