The Double Edged Sword of Political Knowledge

What you know might hurt you.

Not really, however the old adage of what you don’t know can’t hurt you is clearly a false premise. And when you think you know a lot and you’re missing pertinent information, that’s when you’re most at risk.

Americans, as a whole, are extremely un-knowledgeable about politics, though I don’t believe this is an inherently American problem. In representative democracies people elect politicians to be knowledgeable exactly because real life gets in the way of spending time learning about all the issues of the world. It seems common sense that people would understand local and national politics better than international politics because they have more direct interactions with the consequences of national politics. (See Miroslav Nincic) But this limited knowledge of politics doesn’t make people irrational, nor does it make them as quick to change opinions as they are to change moods. The theory of the volatile irrational public was a common viewpoint in academia in the mid 20th century, explicitly discussed academics Gabriel Almond and Walter Lippmann. However, more recent studies on American public opinion have formed a general consensus finding the American public to be quite reasonable and rational, changing positions when the political environment changes. But, how does this mesh with the fact that most Americans don’t actually understand politics that well? Which types of people are most likely to be misinformed, and which types of people are more likely to incorporate new information into their understanding of politics?

In his analysis “Political Ignorance and Collective Policy Preferences”, Martin Gilens argues that there are two types of political policy knowledge, general and specific, and those two different types of knowledge lead to two very different types of people. There are those without a specific political knowledge, but who have general political knowledge. They use ideologies and party lines as a proxy as for their opinions. This means that they don’t tend to be swayed by new information, are hard to convince they are wrong, but, they’re not likely to be duped by media and political misinformation. Then there are those who have a good general knowledge of politics, as well as a good understanding of specific politics. They are at once more willing to incorporate new evidence into their viewpoint, that is, they are willing to change their minds if they receive contradictory evidence, but they are also more vulnerable to misjudging the evidence they know because they believe they have a strong base of political knowledge. (For some alternate opinions about the politically informed public, see John Zaller and James Stimson)

What I found most interesting in the Gilens study is the double edged sword of political knowledge as well as the lack thereof. In a practical sense, if Gilens study is correct, it implies two things about those with more or less specific political knowledge. First, when we think we know a lot, that’s when a lack of evidence can be most harmful to our understanding of issues. People are fallible. We almost never really know enough about all sides of an argument. Thus, ideally our most knowledgeable citizens should be our most humble, understanding that for everything an individual knows, there is probably much more he or she doesn’t know. Second, as for changing the views of those who you know to be wrong because they are too likely to blindly follow a political ideology or they don’t have specific political knowledge on a given subject? Give up. Unless you plan on a full on assault of general and specific political knowledge, then your efforts are better spent on those who have at least some specific knowledge about politics.