Reconsidering the Measurement of Political Knowlege

A basic feature of representative democracy is that citizens use elections as a means of controlling elected officials. A critical maintained hypothesis implicit in that idea is that citizens know enough about politics and public affairs to hold politicians accountable for their behavior in office. If citizens cannot pass even this basic test, then representative government seems an unsure proposition. In short, understanding how elections function in a democracy rests upon being able to evaluate what citizens know about politics and government. In order to answer such questions empirically, we need a high quality measure of citizen’s political knowledge. However, despite its importance, our measures of political sophistication 2 are not as accurate as one would like. Traditionally, most scholars choose one of two routes: either relying on a single item, most typically the interviewer’s subjective assessment of the respondent’s level of political sophistication (Bartels 1996), or alternatively, constructing a knowledge scale built from several factual items (Zaller 1992, Mondak 1999, Mondak 2001). Yet both methods have associated drawbacks. First, if we use a single indicator, we never get any idea of the uncertainty with which we measure a given concept. I