Citizens, knowledge, and the information environment

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. Is there a permanent information underclass in theUnited States? Decades of research would seem tosuggest so. A voluminous literature shows that so-cioeconomic factors, such as being rich or educated, are positively associated with political knowledge (e.g., Ben-nett 1988; Delli Carpini and Keeter 1996; Neuman 1986). So well developed is this literature that the characteris-tics commonly associated with political knowledge are referred to as the “usual suspects ” (e.g., Delli Carpini an