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Is political knowledge unique?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 October 2018

Craig M. Burnett Open the ORCID record for Craig M. Burnett [Opens in a new window]  and
Mathew D. McCubbins
Craig M. Burnett*
Affiliation:
Hofstra University, Hempstead, NY, USA
Mathew D. McCubbins
Affiliation:
Duke University, Durham, NC, USA
*
*Corresponding author. Email: craig.burnett@hofstra.edu
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Abstract

Survey research shows that voters know very little about politics. Left unexamined is whether political knowledge is a distinct type of knowledge when compared to other subjects. We seek to establish a baseline by putting political knowledge into a broader context. We show that our respondents’ knowledge about politics is similar in construction to their knowledge about other subjects, such as shopping, sports, popular culture, geography, economics, and the rules of the road. We conclude that knowledge of politics largely resides on the same dimension as other knowledge topics, implying that knowledge of politics is not a unique construct.

Type
Research Notes
Information
Political Science Research and Methods , Volume 8 , Issue 1 , January 2020 , pp. 188 - 195
Copyright
Copyright © The European Political Science Association 2018 

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Supplementary material: Link

Burnett and McCubbins Dataset

Dataset

https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/GXUY81
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Burnett and McCubbins supplementary material

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