Summing Up

Here's a nice blog post that sums up research about what people know.  It's quite insightful about the standard text and how the data is a bit old and there are significant questions about how we measure political knowledge.  On a day when I'm actually running out the door and out of town, it's a good item to point to rather than come up with something useful myself to say.

I might, if time allows, quibble tomorrow with this graph:

One final point. People who read about politics in the newspaper know more about politics than others, but only when it comes to a particular area: the people and political parties involved in politics. In other words, reading the newspaper doesn't seem to help people understand how politics works or the substance of political issues. As Delli Carpini and Keeter point out, knowledge and understanding of politics depends not only on the will to learn about politics and the resources to achieve that goal, but also the opportunity to learn about it in the first place. 

 But that's for another day, when I'm not traveling.