American politics scholarship has relied extensively on self-reported measures of ideology. We evaluate these widely used measures through an original national survey. Descriptively, we show that Americans’ understandings of “liberal” and “conservative” are weakly aligned with conventional definitions of these terms and that such understandings are heterogeneous across social groups, casting doubt on the construct validity and measurement equivalence of ideological self-placements. Experimentally, we randomly assign one of three measures of ideology to each respondent: (1) the standard ANES question, (2) a version that adds definitions of “liberal” and “conservative,” and (3) a version that keeps these definitions but removes ideological labels from the question. We find that the third measure, which helps to isolate symbolic ideology from operational ideology, shifts self-reported ideology in important ways: Democrats become more conservative, and Republicans more liberal. These findings offer first-cut experimental evidence on the limitations of self-reported ideology as a measure of operational ideology, and contribute to ongoing debates about the use of ideological self-placements in American politics.

An energetic scholarly debate discusses possible reforms of representative democracy. Some support participatory forms of democracy, others a more elite-driven or technocratic democracy. This study contributes to the growing literature on the subject by emphasizing political sophistication as a theoretically relevant predictor of attitudes to democracy: different models of democracy make different demands regarding the political sophistication of citizens. The analysis includes two dimensions and three measures of sophistication: personal sophistication measured as political knowledge and internal efficacy, and impersonal sophistication measured as assessment of others’ political competence. Using the 2011 Finnish National Election Study, we find that perceptions of the sophistication of others have a substantial impact on preferences for political decision-making, and that politically sophisticated people support representative democracy. The analysis shows that perceptions of others’ political competence, which has been largely neglected by previous research, is a both theoretically and empirically relevant predictor of preferences for political decision-making processes.

By many measures, the public knows little about politics. But just how little people seem to know depends on the questions that are put to them. In particular, knowledge levels seem higher when people are asked closed- rather than open-ended questions. In turn, differences between estimated knowledge levels are sometimes attributed to fundamental differences between these types of questions. Building on this previous research, the present study uses a pre-registered experiment conducted with a representative national sample to shed new light on the relationship between question form and knowledge measurement. The authors find that inferences about political knowledge depend less on fundamental differences between open- and closed-ended questions than on two little-appreciated aspects of survey design: the number and difficulty of the response options that accompany closed-ended questions. These aspects of survey design have large effects. Scholars who use the same questions with different response options may reach substantively different conclusions about the public's levels of knowledge.

Recent research using the Big Five model of personality traits has highlighted the importance of personality traits to explaining diverse political behaviours and attitudes. The trait labelled openness to experience has also been found to positively affect political knowledge. This investigation seeks to distinguish two different components of openness: the aesthetic and the intellectual facets. An analysis of the 2015 Canadian Election Study (CES), the 2012 American National Election Study (ANES) and the 2013 ANES Recontact Study was conducted to explore this question. Openness had no significant impact on political knowledge when a measure that more precisely targets intellectualism, as represented by need for cognition, was included. However, open individuals did exhibit higher levels of interest in politics. Finally, openness to experience and need for cognition fostered political knowledge with frequency of political discussion and exposure to disagreement in the CES respondents (Canadians) but not in the ANES respondents (Americans).

When citizens hold multiple values relevant to their policy opinions, they might experience value conflict, value reconciliation or make a value trade-off. Yet, it is unclear which individuals are able to manage their multiple values in these ways. We posit a sophistication-interaction theory of value pluralism where the most politically sophisticated individuals are able to reconcile the existence of multiple values, thus increasing the stability of their policy opinions. We test this hypothesis using a series of heteroskedastic graded item response theory models of public opinion toward policies related to climate change. We find that people structure their policy preferences toward climate change policies in values toward the environment and the economy, but only the most sophisticated citizens are able to reconcile the potential conflict between these values.

Because non-voters are less politically informed than voters, some propose that increasing voter turnout would reduce the quality of information among the active voting population, damaging electoral outcomes. However, the proposed tradeoff between increased participation and informed participation is a false dichotomy. This article demonstrates that political information is endogenous to participation. A field experiment integrates an intensive mobilization treatment into a panel survey conducted before and after a city-wide election. Subjects who were mobilized to vote also became more informed about the content of the election. The results suggest institutions that encourage participation not only increase voter turnout – mobilizing electoral participation also motivates citizens to become more politically informed.

It is widely assumed that a representative democracy requires an enlightened citizenry in order to function properly. The competence of citizens has been studied extensively and the sociodemographic determinants of political sophistication are particularly well known. Much less is known about whether and how citizen competence affects electoral behaviour and outcomes. This article reviews the existing literature on these topics. Despite the widespread consensus that, generally speaking, citizen competence matters for electoral outcomes, the review produced a mixed result: some studies suggest that the political left would benefit from a better-informed electorate, while other studies suggest the opposite. Although the majoritarian electoral context is overrepresented in the evidence, the review shows that at the individual level, political knowledge greatly increases a person’s ability to match personal preferences with the right candidate or party in an election. The article also identifies several gaps in existing knowledge, thereby suggesting future research questions.

This article builds on V.O. Key’s postulate that voters are not fools and that they function as an echo chamber reflecting the clarity of alternatives presented to them. We first propose a reassessment of Key’s claim by examining whether and to what extent the impact of issue preferences on the vote choice depends on the clarity of parties’ profile on these issues. Our empirical tests are based on data from the 2007 Swiss election study and cover three different issues that voters may use as decision-making criteria. Our results confirm that the clearer a party’s profile on a given issue, the higher the impact of that issue on the vote for the party. Second, we offer a refinement of Key’s argument by arguing that voters’ political sophistication conditions the strength of issue voting. Empirical evidence supports this argument, but shows that the effect of political sophistication is curvilinear: sophistication exerts a stronger mediating role when a party has a moderately clear profile than when it has a low or high profile.