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。推动这一项目的理论表明，选民了解政治的那些方面，这些方面是进行理性（有时称为战略）投票所必需的。因此，选民的知识预计会有所不同的政治制度，推动战略投票激励的政治机构不同。这一理论论证有三个不同寻常的特点。 首先，该项目认为，政治知识更紧密地联系在一起的战略激励所产生的行政选拔制度，而不是从选举制度。 第二，该项目认为，更有知识的选民的信息需求有一个不成比例的影响的内容“全国对话”周围的选举，这形状的知识内容的公民远远超出这个小核心的理性选民。 最后，该理论关注的是“可操作的”政治知识，被定义为理性投票所需的信息，而不是大多数政治知识讨论中所特有的公民或时事的“背景”政治知识。 具体而言，该理论映射和解释的背景变化的三个具体方面的政治知识：相对意识形态的政党，相对规模和选举表现的政党，以及内阁组建的通常模式。 为了描述这些方面的政治知识的背景变化，该项目包括三个相关的数据收集工作。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政党的相对意识形态。 第二，六个原始调查（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，或选民对行政人员选拔过程的理解。 最后，在所有130场选举中，围绕选举的“全国性对话”的信息都是通过投票前几周的报纸报道收集的，这130场选举都有相应的调查数据。这一理论的更广泛影响在于，它描绘了一幅与现存文献截然不同的选民图景，后者倾向于过度概括美国选民经常观察到的无知。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）的选民的信息水平与美国相似，在其他制度下（如挪威和丹麦），选民的政治知识水平非常高。 因此，该项目将为负责设计政治制度的政策制定者提供指导，特别是在新民主国家，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.