Measures appendix

Summary

POLITICAL KNOWLEDGE

Since political awareness is the key independent variable in this study, I have extensively investigated how it may be most effectively measured (Zaller, 1985, 1986, 1990; Price and Zaller, 1990). Although some of this work has involved conceptual clarification, most of it has been mundanely empirical, as I have painstakingly tested alternative measures across a variety of datasets and issues. The routine empirical work, however, has paid a useful dividend: It has shown that the effects one attributes to political awareness can depend greatly on how one goes about measuring it.

How to measure political awareness

The surveys of the National Election Studies (NES), which provide the data for almost all of the new analyses reported in this book, contain numerous measures that would seem suitable as measures of political awareness. These include level of political participation (such as engaging in political discussions with friends, giving money to candidates), level of political interest, level of media use, educational attainment, and neutral factual knowledge about politics.

There is no agreement in the existing scholarly literature about which of these measures is best. Even Converse has given mixed signals on this question. In his classic 1964 study of mass belief systems, he made clear that there is a cluster of variables – information, activity, sophistication, education, status as a member of the political elite, and political interest – that are associated with constrained belief systems; of these, the latter two, and especially the last, seem most central to his argument.