The Question(s) of Political Knowledge: A Temporal-Topical Framework

Abstract

Political knowledge is a central concept in the study of public opinion. Yet what the field collectively believes about this construct is based on dozens of isolated studies using a range of different questions as indicators of political knowledge. Integrating previous work on public opinion, we identify two theoretically relevant dimensions: a temporal dimension that corresponds to when a fact was established and a topical dimension that refers to the content of the question. Combining the two dimensions yields four distinct types of knowledge questions. We illustrate the utility of the temporal-topical framework by showing that several classic findings regarding the predictors of knowledge are conditional upon the type of question being asked. In particular, statistical analyses of more than 300 knowledge questions reveal that education, gender, and the mass media have more nuanced effects than previously thought.