MLK

It's Martin Luther King Day, a holiday, and I thought I'd invest a minute or two exploring what people know about MLK.  Here's my favorite from 2007:

In a recent survey of college students on U.S. civic literacy, more than 81 percent knew that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was expressing hope for "racial justice and brotherhood" in his historic "I Have a Dream" speech.

That's the good news.

Most of the rest surveyed thought King was advocating the abolition of slavery.

Oops.  Not that he wouldn't have advocated the abolition of slavery, if it still existed at that time in the U.S., but still, ya gotta wonder.

Beyond knowledge, we can also look at what people think about King.  One good source is this 1999 poll that asked about the greatest people this past century.  King finishes just behind Mother Teresa in the "admire most" score.  As an aside, Bill Clinton wins in the "do not admire" contest -- in a landslide.  A distant second is, um, Billy Graham? 

Of course King's name comes up in a host of other ways, from the controversy over having a holiday in his honor to standard survey questions asking whether King's dream is alive today.  There are too many of those to touch on here, especially when I should be prepping for tomorrow's classes.

What People Know About ... Tim Tebow?

Yes, you read the headline above correctly -- I'm devoting precious blogging space to a quiz on what people know about the former Gator and now Denver Broncos QB.  You can take the quiz, I'll skip it.  But apparently, at least according to an ESPN survey, Tim Tebow is now the most popular athlete in America.

There are 17 questions.  I can't imagine there being 17 facts worth knowing, but then again I'm biased.  I'm at Georgia.

No doubt my colleague Kaye Sweetser can ace it.

Lying About Voting Intent

When people say they're going to vote, do they really vote?  Not according to this study (warning, not yet peer reviewed).  Even worse, from a research standpoint, they find many who say they're not going to vote actually voted.

The study gets at the question a number of ways.  One is simple.  Look at who said they're gonna vote in a survey and then go to the courthouse and see if they actually voted (it's a public record whether or not you voted, but not who you voted for).  They also used an experiment and some other approaches. 

To summarize, these "surprisingly inaccurate self-predictions" are full of measurement error, which can lead to all kinds of problems when you rely on them to, oh, decide on "likely voters" in a horserace poll (this is "grossly inadequate," the authors say) or even as a measure of political interest, motivation, or intent in academic studies.  The authors argue self-prediction is "far inferior to past vote history as a predictor of actual turnout."

Again, the caveat -- this manuscript is under review somewhere and has not as yet undergone a complete peer review.  As such, take the results with a grain of salt until it's been vetted by folks who are serious about this stuff.

But, there's some fascinating discussion at the end of the paper about the psychological underpinnings of saying you're gonna vote and you don't, or to me even more fascinating, saying you're not gonna vote and you do it anyway.  That latter, they argue, may in part be a function of frustration with the political process but among regular voters, the pull of Election Day is simply to much.  So pollsters in particular may be losing important data with their traditional screening questions.

Who Knows More About Politics? Dems vs Republicans

Every election cycle, or maybe every time a new poll comes out, someone asks who knows more about politics -- Democrats, or Republicans?  A glance at the surveys produced by such excellent polling outfits as the Pew Center would lead you to believe Republicans know more than Democrats, at least by a little.  For example, see the table below:

As the accompanying report tells us, GOPers did better than Dems on just three of the 11 questions asked, at least beyond the margin of error.  Dems didn't outscore Republicans on any question beyond the margin of error, though it got a bit close on the obesity question.

So our conclusion is that Republicans are politically smarter than Democrats, at least a little?  Maybe. 

To test this conclusion, I plucked the three questions out of the data that demonstrated a Republican advantage (Republicans control House, source of electricity, reason for Wisconsin protests) and subjected them to a quick-and-dirty analysis that controlled for one obvious factor -- education.

It's an accepted truism in hundreds of academic studies that education remains the most persistent and significant predictor of what people know.  The greater the formal education, the greater the political knowledge, at least in how it's measured in most polls.

So how'd it come out?  Through the magic of multivariate analysis we find that if we enter education first in a logistic regression model, being a Republican (versus Democrat) still predicts greater knowledge in all three questions. 

• What part of Congress do Republicans control?  In this question, even controlling for education, being a Republican makes you twice as likely to answer the question correctly.

• What's the cause of the Wisconsin protests?  Same analysis as above, being Republican makes you 1.5 times more likely to answer correctly.

• On the primary source of electricity, same as the Wisconsin results, with GOPers 1.5 times more likely to be right.

Our takeaway?  On certain questions, being Republican matters.  Now on the control of the House, it's rather obvious why GOPers would do better -- the question asks what do Republicans control.  Let's toss that one out.  But the Wisconsin protests?  You might argue Republicans did better there too given the nature of the controversy and how important it was to partisans, especially a Republican governor.  Let it go too.  But on energy and electricity?  I can't think of any reasonable excuse for Republicans to outscore Democrats, at least in the nature of the question.

Our final takeaway?  Republicans do a wee bit better on a few questions, most of them explained by the nature of the questions themselves, but controlling for education doesn't make these differences go away.

If I were scoring this, I'd call it mostly a tie, but with the slightest of nods toward the Republicans.

Post 1,000

This is the 1,000th post to What People Know, which began over four years ago as an excuse to blog about stuff. 

Sorry, I have nothing special planned.  In fact, I'm simply going to treat this post like any other and point to some research I just found about the television drama The West Wing (that's The Left Wing for you conservative cynics) and its usefulness in teaching young people about civics. 

Yes, the program has been off the air for quite some time.  There's no telling exactly how long this manuscript bounced around various journals before finding a home.  Indeed, I'm fairly positive I saw a version of this at some journal in the past given how many I read for.

As the authors note:  "Even though the liberal argument tends to win out in the end, the show generally represents both sides of an issue, as evidenced in the “Take this Sabbath Day” episode."  That's fine, and it was a helluva show whether you agreed with its politics or not, and the authors do make note of the limitations of such programming in teaching kids about government and politics.  Still, they are optimistic about such programs as a way to engage students.  As they say in their last graph:

We believe creative civics and government teachers can find a multitude of uses for The West Wing if they are willing take a risk and use film or television shows in a proactive way in their classrooms.  At the very least, The West Wing presents students with a portrayal of politics that is more compelling and, in many ways, more authentic than what they see on television or uncover through traditional political instruction.

Jersey Shore Gals and, um, Political Knowledge

I have never ever watched Jersey Shore, but here's Ellen putting them to the test.

My favorite.  "What is a caucus?"

"You mean a part of the body?"

Wow.

All We Get is 20 Good Years?

A new British study finds "The brain's ability to function can start to deteriorate as early as 45." 

BBC version of story here.

As the father of two teenagers, I can definitely say the brain's ability to function at all probably doesn't begin until age 25.  In other words, we've got about 20 good years of cognitive capabilities.  Jeez.



Previous studies found the decline to begin at age 60.  I'm okay with that.  But being on the downside of 45, this new finding is damned depressing. 


Then again, it explains, um, it explains something.  What was I writing about?  Ah hell...