Political Context and Political Knowledge in Modern Democracies

这个项目试图绘制并解释先进工业民主国家政治知识分布的差异。推动这一项目的理论认为，选民可以了解政治的那些方面，这是进行理性(有时称为战略)投票所必需的。因此，选民知识预计会因政治制度的不同而不同，因为推动战略性投票激励的政治机构也不同。这一理论论证有三个不同寻常的特点。首先，该项目认为，政治知识与行政人员遴选制度产生的战略激励比选举制度更紧密地联系在一起。其次，该项目认为，知识含量更高的选民的信息需求对围绕选举的“全国对话”的内容产生了不成比例的影响，这塑造了公民的知识内容，远远超出了这一小部分理性选民的范围。最后，该理论关注的是“可操作的”政治知识，即理性投票所必需的信息，而不是大多数关于政治知识的讨论中所呈现的公民或时事的“背景”政治知识。具体地说，该理论描绘并解释了政治知识的三个特定维度的背景变化：政党的相对意识形态、政党的相对规模和选举表现以及通常的内阁组建模式。为了描述政治知识这些方面的背景差异，该项目包括三项相互关联的数据收集工作。首先，数据收集自20年来来自24个国家的约130项现有选举调查，这些调查要求选民确定各政党的相对意识形态。第二，六项原始调查(在政治背景有特定种类变化的国家)衡量选民对政党的相对规模和选举业绩的实际了解，或选民对行政选举过程的了解。最后，通过报纸在投票前几周对所有130个选举的选举进行报道，收集有关选举的“全国对话”的信息，这些选举将有相应的调查数据。该理论的更广泛影响是，它描绘了一幅与现有文献截然不同的选民图景，后者往往过度概括美国选民经常被观察到的无知。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)的选民证明信息水平与美国相似，但其他国家(如挪威和丹麦)的选民拥有非常高的政治知识水平。因此，该项目将为负责设计政治机构的政策制定者提供指导，指导这些机构如何通过投票方式和投票时使用的信息来影响选民的行为。

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.