Political Context and Political Knowledge in Modern Democracies

该项目旨在绘制和解释先进工业民主国家政治知识分布的变化。推动这个项目的理论表明，选民对理性投票（有时被称为战略投票）所必需的政治方面有所了解。因此，选民的知识预计会随着政治制度的不同而变化，因为驱动战略投票激励的政治制度各不相同。这一理论论证有三个不同寻常的特点。首先，该项目认为，政治知识与行政选拔制度产生的战略激励的关系比与选举制度产生的关系更密切。其次，该项目认为，更有知识的选民对信息的需求对围绕选举的“全国对话”的内容产生了不成比例的影响，这影响了公民的知识内容，远远超出了这一小部分理性选民的核心。最后，该理论将注意力集中在“操作性”政治知识上，即理性投票所需的信息，而不是在大多数政治知识讨论中具有特色的公民或时事的“背景”政治知识。具体来说，该理论在政治知识的三个特定维度上描绘并解释了语境差异：政党的相对意识形态，政党的相对规模和选举表现，以及内阁组成的通常模式。为了描述政治知识这些维度的语境差异，该项目包括三个相互关联的数据收集工作。首先，收集了来自24个国家的近130项现有选举调查的数据，这些调查要求选民识别政党的相对意识形态。其次，六项原始调查（在政治背景有特定变化的国家）衡量选民对政党的相对规模和选举表现的操作知识，或选民对行政选择过程的理解。最后，关于围绕选举的“全国对话”的信息是通过在投票前几周对所有130个选举的报纸报道收集的，这些选举将有相应的调查数据。该理论更广泛的影响在于，它描绘了一幅与现有文献截然不同的选民图景，而现有文献往往过度概括了人们经常观察到的美国选民的无知。也就是说，从选民知识的真正比较角度来看，虽然一些国家（如英国）的选民的证据信息水平与美国相似，但其他制度（如挪威和丹麦）的选民具有非常高的政治知识水平。因此，该项目将为负责设计政治制度（特别是在新兴民主国家）的政策制定者提供指导，让他们了解这些制度如何影响选民的行为，包括他们如何投票和他们在投票时使用的信息。

This project seeks to map and explain variation in the distribution of political knowledge in the advanced industrial democracies. The theory that drives this project suggests that voters become informed about those aspects of politics necessary for casting a rational (sometimes called a strategic) vote. Consequently, voter knowledge is expected to vary over political systems as the political institutions that drive strategic voting incentives vary. There are three unusual features of the theoretical argument. First, the project argues that political knowledge is more closely connected to the strategic incentives arising from the system of executive selection than from the electoral system. Second, the project contends that the informational requirements of more knowledgeable voters have a disproportionate effect on the content of the "national conversation" surrounding elections and this shapes knowledge content of citizens far beyond this small core of rational voters. Finally, the theory focuses attention on "operational" political knowledge, defined as the information necessary to vote rationally, rather than on the kinds of "background" political knowledge of civics or current events that is featured in most discussion of political knowledge. Specifically, the theory maps and explains contextual variation in three specific dimensions of political knowledge: the relative ideologies of the parties, the relative size and electoral performance of the parties, and the usual patterns of cabinet formation. In order to describe contextual variation in these dimensions of political knowledge, the project includes three linked data collection efforts. First, data are collected from approximately 130 existing electoral surveys from 24 countries over two decades that ask voters to identify the relative ideologies of parties. Second, six original surveys (in countries with specific kinds of variation in political context) measure voters' operational knowledge of either the relative size and electoral performance of parties or voters' understanding of the process of executive selection. Finally, information about the "national conversation" surrounding elections is collected using newspaper reports about the elections in the weeks prior to the poll for all of the 130 elections for which there will be corresponding survey data.The broader impact of the theory is that it paints a rather different picture of voters than the extant literature, which tends to over-generalize the often-observed ignorance of American voters. That is, a truly comparative perspective on voter knowledge reveals that while voters in some countries (like the UK) evidence information levels similar to those in the U.S., voters in other systems (like Norway and Denmark) have remarkably high levels of political knowledge. As a consequence, the project will give policymakers charged with designing political institutions, particularly in new democracies, guidance concerning how those institutions influence voters' behavior, both through how they vote and the information that they use when voting.