Ideology, Knowledge and Context. A multilevel study of "Political Sophistication" across 21 countries

Why do citizens levels of political knowledge and ideological comprehension vary from country to country? Which contextual characteristics can explain the differences across countries? These are the main questions of this thesis, which investigates the relationship between political and socio-economic context and citizen s political sophistication -levels. For many decades, scholars within the field of political sophistication mainly focused on explaining differences within single countries. The importance of characteristics such as education, gender and income is thus well-documented. However, less interest has been paid to the comparative perspective of political sophistication, and scholars disagree about why citizens levels of political knowledge and ideological comprehension vary across countries. The consensus within literature has been that the electoral and political system influence citizens sophistication levels; however, recent research suggests that the socio-economic equality of a country may be the true deciding factor. This thesis puts these two competing contextual theories to the test by examining 21 modern democracies, applying multilevel modeling to data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES). The main finding is that a country s degree of income inequality explains why citizens differ in political sophistication across countries, and reduces the importance of e.g. citizens educational level. A second finding is that while the current political knowledge-measures can capture individual level variations in political knowledge, it does not perform well for cross-national comparisons and should be applied with caution in comparative studies