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Americans know more about politics than they used to

Matt Yglesias has a question:

Some time ago I became interested in this question too. More broadly, I was also interested in whether high school kids are less educated now than they used to be.

But this turns out to be an almost impossible question to answer. Oh, you can answer it pretty well if you only go back to 1992,¹ but I wanted to go back farther. At least to the 1950s, and ideally back to the turn of the 20th century.

There's some suggestive evidence going back that far, but it's really hard to find anything definitive. Eventually my interest flagged and I moved on to other things. But I did find one interesting little nugget that's been sitting on my computer for a while, and I suppose this is a good time to share it. It's a comparison of basic political knowledge based on a 1989 survey that asked the same questions as a 1940s/50s survey:

As you can see, the authors found that 1989 Americans were more knowledgable on practically every question except the ones that asked about specific people. Apparently we have better book knowledge of political questions, but we don't care as much about who the actual people are who represent us.

This is just one survey, and not to be taken too seriously. Still, if it's true it's sort of interesting—and speaks even more highly of our collective political knowledge. After all, it really has become less important in the modern era to care about the specific individuals who represent us, especially in Congress. All that matters is what party they belong to.

Anyway, this is an interesting tidbit and I thought I'd share it. Draw your own conclusions.

¹People are neither more misinformed nor less educated than they were in 1992. I'd say the evidence is fairly overwhelming on this point.

18 thoughts on “Americans know more about politics than they used to

  1. cld

    For conservatives this is analogous to the increase in verisimilitude in horror movies over time.

    More believable background details to support the increasing;y imaginary godawfulness.

  2. golack

    Just a note: knowing that the first 10 amendments to the Constitution is called the "Bill of Rights" is not the same as knowing the Bill of Rights.

  3. name99

    Does "politics" mean
    - the motives and behaviors of actual human beings as exhibited throughout history OR
    - the platitudes and myths of our time, the myths that change every two generations or so -- and that are used by a few smart people to guide the idiot masses down whatever direction is desired?

    Knowledge of the myths of our time (and their use by the masses) is the same as always.
    Knowledge of actual human behavior and history is, likewise, the same as always.

    I *think* the mechanisms of suppression of the second by the first are superficially stronger than before (there is more running people out of their jobs, public fear of admitting heresy, and so on, than in say the 60s through the 90s). But we had that same aggressively enforced conformity in the 50s. I think actually the aggressively enforced conformity, in the US anyway, corresponds to the end stages of an ideology, to the point where a critical mass of people (especially among the young) grow tired of, and can see the obvious lies in, the ruling ideology, and that's what we have ahead of us. The 2020s as our 50s, and the 2030s as our 60s.

    But overall, as always, the True Knowledge ala Ken MacLeod is the province of very few; not because it is hidden, but because the average person is too lazy to make any effort to look beyond cultural conformity (or its tweedledee idiot cousin, cultural rebellion).

  4. royko

    Anecdote time. My mom and father-in-law are both college educated and reasonably intelligent people. But both watch Fox News.

    Last year, at one family dinner, my mom told me (and my father-in-law agreed) that California had made it illegal to steal up to $1000 from stores. You can just walk in and take it, and they can't stop you. There's video even!

    None of this is true, of course. California raised the limit to make shoplifting go from a misdemeanor to a felony from $400 to $1000, partly due to inflation, partly due to prison overcrowding. But stealing is still illegal, and you can still go to jail for it.

    Now, I understand that California has a reputation for being a whacko leftist state with some screwy ideas. But they have stores in California. Do my parents and in-laws really believe that all the store owners in CA just allow this to happen? Do they really think they have absolutely no political pull? There's no Chamber of Commerce? For God's sake, Apple is headquartered in CA, do they really think Apple execs would ever allow up to $1000 in merchandise to be stolen from Apple stores? How would grocery stores even function?

    This is just a single example. But I can't go more than about 20 minutes into a conversation with my parents without hearing them repeat some total falsehood or deceptively misleading piece of information that they heard on Fox News. Debunking it gets exhausting.

    I don't doubt that older people have believed some pretty silly things in the past. But I have to imagine that Fox News pumping out fake stories on a daily basis has an impact.

    1. Ken Rhodes

      Royko, I have absolutely no reason to doubt your verisimilitude, but I have to wonder about something. Your parents are educated and intelligent, but instead of trying to challenge the Fox BS directly, might this not be a more effective counter:

      "Mom, Dad, does that sound plausible to you? Does it sound plausible that businesses would just roll over on petty theft and accept that they have no recourse? Why not try this--use some good public resources (NOT news media) to check out that report. Ask Google to find some resources on 'California laws about petty theft and shoplifting.' See what you find on actual law websites, like for instance local law firms in L.A. and San Fran, or perhaps the Law Reviews of some California law schools. That should tell you whether Fox News is giving you the straight scoop, or perhaps slanting their wording to create a misleading story."

      1. LostPorch

        Good question. I've also found the question "What would it take to change your mind? ie, what information could I present that would make you reconsider your position?" helpful/useful.

    2. name99

      OK, let's flip the script.
      Someone tells you "In college my Women's Studies class taught me that gender is a 100% cultural construction; there is absolutely nothing different between men and women that can't be explained by upbringing".

      Do you respond to this by saying "right on, I absolutely agree"?
      Or by saying "OK, does that sound plausible to you? Everything you know about male-female differences, from violence to interest in machinery rather than people? Everything from history, across every society? It's all cultural that just, bizarrely, happened to flow in a single direction"?

      Left and right both have their myths. Both care about their myths A LOT more than about something as petty as the truth. Both will defend their myths to the death, even if that means insisting loudly that they believe what is clearly utter nonsense. And both will aggressively attack heretics who mock the myth as beyond the pale.

      And so it has always been. Ask a devout religious person if they REALLY believe that Jesus was born of a virgin. Ask a devout Marxist if they REALLY believe that, come the revolution, suddenly all humans will find absolutely nothing to disagree about.

  5. frankwilhoit

    Yglesias asks the right question, but we must tilt our dominant ear towards its subtext. What he is after, whether he knows it or not, is the distinction between information and literature (the connotations of the word "myth" are too grandiose). This is not about what information people are given, but what use they make of it. It is about what it means to "tell" someone something, be it via top-down broadcast or peer-to-peer. It is about the distinction between knowledge and belief, two concepts and words that are frequently elided. It is about whether sources are "trusted", and that is about how sources earn "trust".

    ...and all of that is broken all to Hell, and definitely more so today than thirty years ago, and how you measure that has nothing to do with whether people can correctly answer semantically-shallow factual questions (especially if they are multiple-guess: were they?)

    1. name99

      Except that it never was different.
      Read political texts from, say, the 1940s, and you will discover the exact same complaints.

  6. jeffreycmcmahon

    Mr. Drum, can you please never use "delta" to say "mathematical difference", that is specialist jargon and not a term in common parlance.

    1. Joseph Harbin

      You make a persuasive case.

      It's conjecture, since we didn't have a pandemic in 1992. We didn't have the technology then to create a vaccine in one year, but I do think we'd have had a wider acceptance of a vaccine when it came. Yglesias's separated-at-birth-twin E. Klein would say the problem today is trust, but there's no way around it. Massive misinformation is killing people today at an alarming rate.

      Information does not accrete, with one layer building on previous layers so that over time we have a larger base of agreed-upon knowledge than before. It works more like entropy, with our base of knowledge deteriorating over time unless energy is expended to maintain the collective store of knowledge. Some new knowledge is added, but when the merchants of disinformation have turbocharged tools to "flood the zone with shit," we as a society are getting dumber by the day. It doesn't mean we can't get better at fighting disinformation, but the last few years will likely go down as a historically stupid era. The country in 1992 would never have been so dumb to elect D. Trump. We need to make that true again for the future.

      An example for our times: Before the '90s, people knew what a Nazi was. In the '90s, people also knew what a Soup Nazi was. Today, a rep in Congress can't tell the difference between a soup and a Nazi.

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