Political Knowledge

New research investigates how group sentiments shape partisan identity and political knowledge.

This study asks whether people living under authoritarianism form stable, constrained preferences across multiple policy domains and whether autocratic incentives to suppress preference formation prevent such stability. Using three surveys—two longitudinal—conducted in China, the authors examine intertemporal stability in a range of policy and value areas and report that many preferences show substantial stability over month-long and year-long intervals. The paper preserves caveats about measurement and context and offers recommendations for measuring preference configuration in authoritarian settings.

This study asks whether empathy for racial outgroups predicts greater opposition to state-level voting restrictions, and whether that relationship depends on awareness that such laws are racially targeted. Using multiple national surveys from 2018–2024, the authors examine links between outgroup empathy, political sophistication, and attitudes toward a suite of laws that increase the burden on eligible voters after Shelby County v. Holder.

Conspiracy beliefs shape political discourse, yet their individual-level drivers remain unclear. This study examines conspiratorial predispositions through a motivational lens, arguing that belief serves psychological needs alongside ideological ones.

This article explores the strategic media consumption habits of politically partisan individuals, revealing how they deliberately choose to stay informed or disengage based on their interests and goals.

This study asks whether commonly observed gaps—women scoring lower on political knowledge, expressing less interest, and being less likely to give valid answers—are driven by how surveys define "politics." The author shifts the focus from questions about political institutions to a broader set of issues that can be considered political, and uses an experimental design to test whether measurement choices systematically disadvantage women. The contribution is a qualified challenge to the conventional interpretation of political knowledge and interest: the gender gaps appear to depend on the traditional, institution-centered content of survey items rather than on an overall deficit in women’s political information or engagement.

This article examines how political knowledge influences belief network dynamics over time.

Existing studies reveal that survey respondents are sensitive to information sources regarding political corruption. This sensitivity appears stronger among politically sophisticated citizens.

New research challenges a long-standing assumption within political science: that measuring individuals' knowledge of the exact seat distribution among parties is too complex for surveys. This article tackles this question directly, asking whether survey researchers can successfully gauge citizens' understanding of partisan legislative representation.

This study examines white college students' attitudes toward race-based affirmative action in Brazil, asking whether those attitudes stem from prejudice, intergroup conflict, or individual political predispositions. An indirect questioning technique is used to reduce social desirability bias and produce a more accurate portrait of opinions about quota policies at the Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC).

This paper examines voting behavior in California's Proposition 23, which aimed to repeal climate change legislation. While studies suggest people use party leader or candidate image heuristics for ballot decisions, the impact among knowledgeable versus less knowledgeable voters remains debated.

Multiple-choice and open-ended formats are both widely used to measure political knowledge. Conventional wisdom holds that multiple-choice items provoke guessing, which can lead to underestimated item-difficulty parameters and biased estimates of respondents' political knowledge.

Survey questions that ask who will win an election are common, but they capture winners rather than the underlying vote shares. This study compares that standard qualitative approach with a simple alternative: asking respondents to predict candidates' vote shares.

This article introduces a new typology of political knowledge questions by identifying two dimensions: atemporal vs. topical and specific vs. general facts.

Valid comparisons of group scores on additive measures like political knowledge scales require that, after controlling for an individual's overall level on the latent trait, the conditional probabilities of responding to each item are invariant across groups. If this measurement invariance fails, apparent differences between subgroups may reflect measurement artifacts rather than true knowledge gaps.