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Citizens, Knowledge, and the Information Environment
Author(s) -
Jerit Jennifer,
Barabas Jason,
Bolsen Toby
Publication year - 2006
Publication title -
american journal of political science
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 6.347
H-Index - 170
eISSN - 1540-5907
pISSN - 0092-5853
DOI - 10.1111/j.1540-5907.2006.00183.x
Subject(s) - socioeconomic status , politics , predictive power , variation (astronomy) , democracy , knowledge level , common knowledge (logic) , political science , knowledge management , psychology , sociology , computer science , mathematics education , epistemology , population , demography , artificial intelligence , philosophy , physics , multimodal logic , astrophysics , law , epistemic modal logic , description logic
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 .