What do Kenyans Know About Devolution? Survey Evidence on Political Knowledge and Public Opinion

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ken Ochieng' Opalo
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Political Knowledge

Closeness Counts: Increasing Precision and Reducing Errors in Mass Election Predictions

2015 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 518-533 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kai Quek ◽  
Michael W. Sances
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Collective Intelligence ◽  
Political Knowledge ◽  
Natural Experiments ◽  
Partisan Bias ◽  
2012 Election ◽  
Multiple Constituencies ◽  
Economic Perceptions

Mass election predictions are increasingly used by election forecasters and public opinion scholars. While they are potentially powerful tools for answering a variety of social science questions, existing measures are limited in that they ask about victors rather than voteshares. We show that asking survey respondents to predict voteshares is a viable and superior alternative to asking them to predict winners. After showing respondents can make sensible quantitative predictions, we demonstrate how traditional qualitative forecasts lead to mistaken inferences. In particular, qualitative predictions vastly overstate the degree of partisan bias in election forecasts, and lead to wrong conclusions regarding how political knowledge exacerbates this bias. We also show how election predictions can aid in the use of elections as natural experiments, using the effect of the 2012 election on partisan economic perceptions as an example. Our results have implications for multiple constituencies, from methodologists and pollsters to political scientists and interdisciplinary scholars of collective intelligence.

Political Knowledge among Youth: Some Notes on Public Opinion Formation

1974 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 334-340 ◽  
Author(s):  
Farhat Ghaem Maghami
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Political System ◽  
Political Socialization ◽  
Political Knowledge ◽  
The Political ◽  
Opinion Formation ◽  
Beliefs And Values

Political socialization is defined as the acquisition of orientations, beliefs, and values relating to the political system of which an individual is a part. In this study we are concerned with political knowledge about one of David Easton's major components of a political system: the authorities.

Values, Political Knowledge, and Public Opinion about Gay Rights

2003 ◽  
Vol 67 (2) ◽  
pp. 173-201 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul R. Brewer
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Gay Rights ◽  
Political Knowledge

The Question(s) of Political Knowledge

2014 ◽  
Vol 108 (4) ◽  
pp. 840-855 ◽  
Author(s):  
JASON BARABAS ◽  
JENNIFER JERIT ◽  
WILLIAM POLLOCK ◽  
CARLISLE RAINEY
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Mass Media ◽  
Political Behavior ◽  
Political Knowledge ◽  
Central Concept ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Types Of Knowledge ◽  
Question Types ◽  
The Mass Media

Political knowledge is a central concept in the study of public opinion and political behavior. Yet what the field collectively believes about this construct is based on dozens of studies using different indicators of knowledge. We identify two theoretically relevant dimensions: atemporaldimension that corresponds to the time when a fact was established and atopicaldimension that relates to whether the fact is policy-specific or general. The resulting typology yields four types of knowledge questions. In an analysis of more than 300 knowledge items from late in the first decade of the 2000s, we examine whether classic findings regarding the predictors of knowledge withstand differences across types of questions. In the case of education and the mass media, the mechanisms for becoming informed operate differently across question types. However, differences in the levels of knowledge between men and women are robust, reinforcing the importance of including gender-relevant items in knowledge batteries.

Who is Ideological? Measuring Ideological Consistency in the American Public

The Forum ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 97-122 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Barber ◽  
Jeremy C. Pope
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Political Knowledge ◽  
Demographic Variables ◽  
Mass Public ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Key Variables

Abstract Political constraint and issue consistency are key variables in the study of public opinion, but the existing literature contains many parallel but contradictory accounts of the sources and predictors of ideological constraint. Some posit that constraint is essentially a function of a person’s partisan commitment, others suggest it is rooted in participation in politics, while others see a wide range of correlates summarized as “sophistication.” Still others deny that constraint exists in the mass public altogether. Contrary to these accounts, we argue that issue consistency exists within the American public and is best predicted by political knowledge, which should be thought of as separate from those other predictors. In fact, after accounting for political knowledge, other variables like partisanship, participation, and demographic variables have little independent relationship to ideological constraint. The data show that political knowledge is about as strong a predictor of issue consistency as is one’s self-placed ideology – a widely used proxy for constraint. These results help us understand how citizens think about politics and which groups of people most closely resemble elites in the structure of their opinions. Our findings show that previously hypothesized predictors of constraint – particularly partisanship and participation – are mainly related to ideological constraint through a person’s level of political knowledge.

scholarly journals Computerized Adaptive Testing for Public Opinion Surveys

2013 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 172-192 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacob M. Montgomery ◽  
Josh Cutler
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Measurement Accuracy ◽  
Computerized Adaptive Testing ◽  
Political Knowledge ◽  
Adaptive Testing ◽  
Measurement Precision ◽  
Public Opinion Surveys ◽  
Accuracy And Precision ◽  
Latent Dimension ◽  
Latent Traits

Survey researchers avoid using large multi-item scales to measure latent traits due to both the financial costs and the risk of driving up nonresponse rates. Typically, investigators select a subset of available scale items rather than asking the full battery. Reduced batteries, however, can sharply reduce measurement precision and introduce bias. In this article, we present computerized adaptive testing (CAT) as a method for minimizing the number of questions each respondent must answer while preserving measurement accuracy and precision. CAT algorithms respond to individuals' previous answers to select subsequent questions that most efficiently reveal respondents' positions on a latent dimension. We introduce the basic stages of a CAT algorithm and present the details for one approach to item selection appropriate for public opinion research. We then demonstrate the advantages of CAT via simulation and empirically comparing dynamic and static measures of political knowledge.

Latent Constructs in Public Opinion

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Warshaw
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Political Knowledge ◽  
Racial Prejudice ◽  
Consumer Confidence ◽  
Public Opinion Research ◽  
Latent Constructs ◽  
Survey Questions ◽  
The Individual

Many of the most important constructs in public opinion research are abstract, latent quantities that cannot be directly observed from individual questions on surveys. Examples include ideology, political knowledge, racial prejudice, and consumer confidence. In each of these examples, individual survey questions are merely noisy indicators of the theoretical quantities that scholars are interested in measuring. This chapter describes a number of approaches for measuring latent constructs such as these at both the individual and group levels. It also discusses a number of substantive applications of latent constructs in public opinion research. Finally, it discusses methodological frontiers in the measurement of latent constructs.

Political Knowledge and Policy Representation in the States

2016 ◽  
Vol 45 (6) ◽  
pp. 907-938 ◽  
Author(s):  
William P. Jaeger ◽  
Jeffrey Lyons ◽  
Jennifer Wolak
Keyword(s):  
Public Policy ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
State Government ◽  
Political Knowledge ◽  
Policy Outcomes ◽  
The Public ◽  
National Surveys ◽  
Policy Representation ◽  
Political Outcomes ◽  
Low Levels

Political knowledge is central to the success of representative democracy. However, public policy has been shown to follow public opinion even despite low levels of political information in the electorate. Does this mean that political knowledge is irrelevant to policy representation? We consider whether knowledgeable electorates are better able to achieve representative policy outcomes. Using the heterogeneity in the responsiveness of government across the states, we consider how state political knowledge moderates the connection between citizen ideology and the policy outcomes of state government. Using national surveys and multilevel logit with post-stratification, we develop measures of collective political knowledge in the states. We test whether knowledgeable electorates are more likely to secure representative political outcomes than less politically informed constituencies. We find that as state political knowledge increases, so does the correspondence between the preferences of the public and the ideological tenor of state policy outcomes.

Review of Reader in Public Opinion and communication.

1966 ◽  
Vol 11 (6) ◽  
pp. 316-316
Author(s):  
No authorship indicated
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion
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