“Reading More Newspapers and Voting Less?”A Rejoinderto Pattie and Johnston

Extract

In their article, C. J. Pattie and R. J. Johnston(2003) do me the honour of putting a key aspect of my approach to therelationship between civic literacy and political participation to thetest. Do recent British data, they ask, confirm my expectation thatnewspaper reading enhances civic literacy, and thus voter turnout?Though I am gratified that they chose to address this issue, and in sucha thorough manner, and though there is much in the article which isvaluable, I must ultimately take issue with their methodology and, thus,the central conclusion they draw.