The More You Know, the More You Don't Know?

The more Republicans know about the politics, the more likely they believe in political conspiracy theories.This conclusion comes from an article in Mother Jones and relies on a survey conducted last month.  More on that survey in a moment.

Here's the crux of the article:

Among Democrats and independents, having a higher level of political knowledge was correlated with decreased belief in conspiracies. But precisely the opposite was the case for Republicans, where knowledge actually made the problem worse. For each political knowledge question that they answered correctly, Republicans' belief in at least one conspiracy theory tended to increase by 2 percentage points.

The article's author, Chris Mooney, knows his stuff.  He suggests the reason may in part have to do with a conservative's greater need for "cognitive closure" and a need for certainty. A reasonable hypothesis, but I'd counter it has more to do with the nature of the conspiracies examined in the survey.  The two "conservative" conspiracies are about Obama specifically, the two "liberal" conspiracies have to do with Bush stealing the 2000 election and "The Truther" movement about 9/11.

Equivalent?  I'm not convinced.  But let's turn to the survey itself, a national poll of 814 registered voters conducted in December 2012.  First, despite the claim, it's really a survey of people who say they're registered voters, but that's a methodological quibble.  Political scientist Dan Cassino, who runs the Fairleigh Dickinson University poll, says "birther" conspiracy theory is likely to believed more than others because "it's been discussed so often." 

Yup.  Two myths are anchored on Obama, are more recent, and received lots of mainstream media play -- mostly attempts to debunk them.  I'd add here that there's a growing body of research that suggests attempts to debunk myths actually adds to their believability for some people, so I'd be damned cautious about arguing politically knowledgeable Republicans are more likely to believe "their" favorite myths compared to politically knowledgeable Democrats and "their" favorite myths.

And here's a point from Cassino's press release that doesn't comfortably fit the Republicans-are-evil-and-dumb narrative -- young African-Americans are more likely than whites to believe in conspiracy theories.  Not sure how the hell you explain that one.  Would you even want to try?  Not me.

If we buy this set of conspiracy theories are equivalent (debatable) and if we buy into how the survey measures political knowledge (can't tell from the release), then the results raise a number of questions. 

Allow me to get a bit PhDweebish below. 

Greater political knowledge should result in less belief in conspiracies, but hold on.  The theory of motivated reasoning suggests partisans, even knowledgeable ones, will be more likely to believe such myths.  That's all partisans, not just one side of the divide.  Essentially, people believe what they want to believe, especially when it's negative about someone they disagree with or dislike.  So I maintain the Obama-anchored questions are not equivalent to the "truther" and "stolen election" questions.  The latter are from several years ago, myths that received less mainstream news play by comparison -- and certainly damn little near the time the survey was conducted. This can skew your results.

Perhaps, and only perhaps, the Mother Jones article is a textbook instance of motivated reasoning, of seeing and believing what you want to believe -- in this case, about Republicans.

News with a Partisan Slant?

I wrote a couple of days ago about a new Public Opinion Quarterly study that finds people who consume "likeminded news" (news that agrees with their partisan point of view) actually increases certain aspects of political participation.  In that piece I promised to review the study author's categorization scheme for which television news programs qualified as being slanted toward Republicans, Democrats, or neutral.  Here's my take.

First, let's recreate the list from the study's appendix (Table A1, p. 312, if you have access to POQ).  Remember these are 2008 programs, so some have disappeared.  I comment after each category, only briefly, then I'll get into details after the list on how the author assigned programs or networks to the categories.

Programs with a Republican Slant

The Beltway Boys
Fox & Friends
Fox News
The Fox Report with Shepard Smith
Geraldo at Large
etc etc., all of them Fox News programs...

Okay, I stopped here listing them because they're all Fox News shows, and I think most of us might agree with the slant (except Studio B with Shepard Smith, which to me is one of the more "straight" presentations on Fox.  So I quibble with that one).


Programs with a Democratic Slant

ABC Nightline
Anderson Cooper 360
BET News
CNN Headline News
The Colbert Report (really, it's in there)
Countdown with Keith Olbermann
The Daily Show (really)
Good Morning America
Hardball with Chris Matthews
Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer
MSNBC Live
Out in the Open
Situation Room
The View
This Week with George Stephanopoulous

As you can tell, a bunch of major networks and their shows.  Again I have quibbles, especially with Situation Room, which strikes me as a journalism guy with some small experience as fairly straightforward in its presentation. And it's amusing to see Steward and Colbert in there as news programs, but I think we can all buy into that as well.


And finally, Neutral Programs

ABC World News
CBS Evening News
America This Morning
CBS Morning News
etc etc. all three major networks and morning shows
Frontline
Larry King Live
Lou Dobbs
60 Minutes
McLaughlin Group
20/20
NewsHour
Reliable Sources
Meet the Press

Okay, we can quibble with the list above too.  Lou Dobbs?  Neutral?  McLaughlin Group?  All in all, the list above seems mostly right to me, but of course your first methodological question should be -- how the heck do you systematically decide what program or network goes in which category?  Good question.  The explanation, also found in the article's appendix, is complicated.  Let's walk through it.

• What candidate does a program favor?  This was a follow-up question to respondents who reported certain media exposure.
• Mix and Match.  "I took into account respondents' perceptions of partisan slant for both the program and its parent network," says the author, trying to assign a category to unmentioned programs or to further justify the categorization.
• A statistical threshold of 25 percent was used to make sure the categories were firm.  More on this in the appendix.
• A Lexis-Nexis search was used for rarely mentioned programs, using various terms like liberal or Republican to assign a slant to a program or its host.

This is some creative work, and I've only skimmed above the detailed effort to assign programs to what any reasonable, informed person might (or might not) agree with.  But it's important some systematic approach be used, not just gut feeling, when doing this kind of work. So I applaud the effort while quibbling with a few of the assignments.  After all, in large part we're talking above about general respondent impressions of a news organization or program and their slant, not the reality of its journalistic approach.  Given the constraints, this is an excellent stab at categorizing programs and networks.

Blogging and the Knowledge Gap

Not all bloggers are created equal, according to a new study in The Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication.  As the author concludes:

Consistent with knowledge gap hypothesis, bloggers with higher SES tend to produce more political knowledge and have more social power than lower-SES segments. Moreover, even among filter bloggers who produce more political knowledge, SES, gender, and print media use are associated with their social influences. This structural inequity within the virtual political space mirrors existing material and legitimized reality in U.S. politics.

The author breaks bloggers into two groups -- filter bloggers and personal journals -- and examine a knowledge production gap.  So, in reality, this is a knowledge gap study. 

Most "political" or "news" bloggers are reactive; that is, they offer mediated content, the stuff they've taken from news sites and added "value" or opinion or spin or whatever you choose to call it, depending I suppose on whether you agree or disagree with their partisan point of view.  But sometimes they offer unique or original knowledge, the most famous being Rathergate.

This study notes that personal journals far outnumber "filter blogs," and the author notes lots of other blogs exist.  What's interesting for me are the tables where the author shows what factors predict engaging in one kind of blog versus the other.  Read 'em yourself for details, but the results show knowledge being produced on the Internet by pretty much demographically speaking the same folks who generate knowledge in the MSM: older, better educated folks.  TV watching is positively associated with "personal" blogging but not "filter" blogging, which is kinda interesting.  Gotta watch TV to fill in that personal blog, I guess.

And for those of you with a partisan bent, I end with the following, which I find fascinating:

Overall, liberal bloggers have more incoming links while Republican bloggers have more daily hits. This finding looks odd at a first glance. However, it indicates a subtle difference between incoming links and hits. Whereas incoming links from other bloggers represent the popularity of a blog in the blogosphere, daily hits demonstrate the actual number of visits a blog has and its reach in the general cyberspace. The hits a blog receives come not only from other bloggers or other content producers, but from other Internet users who may or may not engage in online authoring. This suggests that liberal bloggers are more powerful in the blogosphere while Republican bloggers have more power throughout the Internet.

-
Full cite: Lu Wei, Filter blogs versus personal journals:
Understanding the Knowledge Production Gap on the
Internet.  Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication
14 (2009) 532–558.

Civic Engagement and Ideology

Everyone agrees civic engagement is important, and that young people need to be encouraged to participate.  After that, it gets kinda political.

Here's an Inside Higher Ed article that outlines the basic idea here, that colleges need to do more.  The lede:

There is strong support among students and faculty members for the idea that colleges have a role to play in encouraging civic engagement and promoting good citizenship. But there are real doubts about whether colleges are actually carrying out that role.

No argument here, and the article pumps a lot of tables at you to make the point.  A similar article can be found here at the Chronicle of Higher Education.   The lede:

Colleges are not promoting civic engagement nearly as strongly as their students, faculty members, and administrators believe they should be, says a report released today by the Association of American Colleges and Universities, a group that promotes liberal education.

To be journalistically picky, the "who said" should never be as long as the "what said" in a lede.  But that's the journalism prof in me rearing my ugly head.

Again, no big deal.  But you do get organizations with a somewhat political/partisan/ideological bent in this debate.  Go here and scroll down, you'll find a link to their guide to what colleges don't tell you.  Some of this is the old preserve western civilization argument (one I'm supportive of, but one that is nonetheless ripe with ideological overtones). 

Click on a state, see how the universities score.  My school -- UGA -- got a B.  UF only got a C, meaning we finally beat 'em at something.  Rice, a great school in Texas, got an F.  That alone makes you wonder about the scoring system.

So sometimes what people know, or what is taught, is full of political undertones.

The Partisan Divide

Are Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, dogs and cats, really growing further apart? Some new Pew Center numbers certainly suggest this is the case -- well, not for dogs and cats, but yes for political beliefs. Look at the graph to the right, hot linked from the Pew site. And especially look at the methodological info below. Over 22 years, 48 values, trended for your ease and enjoyment.

Pretty damn telling.

The full report is broader, more comprehensive, and worth the read. It'll be depressing at times for Republicans, but take to heart the fact the data here do not go as far back as the 1970s and post-Watergate. Other data sources, such as ANES, do so, and you'll see this is all cyclical. If you look at this graph, for example, you'll see the 1970s drop and another when Clinton was elected.

The Pew report is something special because it goes beyond attitudes about political parties and gets into the stuff of what people know and think about the important issues of the day. Section 4 on religious beliefs is a personal favorite because I do research in that area. Section 11 discusses the partisan gaps, if that's more your thing. Finally, section 8 examines political participation

I will explore this report in more detail as the week progresses because it is full of good stuff.

A Polarized Public?

Is the American electorate politically polarized, or just the elites? These competing hypotheses have been analyzed, the data tortured, the essays and journal articles written, and still we don't know for sure. But we're getting close to a consensus, I believe. This does matter because a polarized public is not necessarily a good thing when it comes to compromise and legislation -- although there is some suggestion that the more polarized people are, the more they learn.

Anyway, this essay at Real Clear Politics gets at the topic and is worth the read. It gets into ideological and partisan "sorting" and all kinds of cool stuff. Highly recommended.

Near the end the author, Jay Cost, cites and agrees with a previous study that argues:

Contemporary American politics is probably best described as polarized on the elite level and increasingly well sorted in the electorate.

Yup. Which leads to all kinds of interesting media content (polarized since media tend to be at the elite level) and a depressed news audience (pissed at elite polarized content?). News networks play to the most polarized in their political coverage, in part because only the polarized are still paying attention to the news, but we get into a chicken-and-egg thing here that I want to explore more on a later post.

Of Partisanship and Participation

A fascinating piece in The American Prospect analyzes the civic decline debate and asks whether political parties and partisanship should be written off as important factors in increasing political participation. At its heart, author Henry Farrell argues theorists failed to understand the power of technology, particularly the Internet, to foster participation.

Political blogs don't fit well with deliberation theory. They are rough, raucous, and vigorously partisan.

In many ways this is a defense of blogs and blogging. Hell, I can hardly blog an attack on a defense of blogging, plus there is a navel-gazing aspect to doing so that irritates the senses. Not going there. Finally:

That said, however, there remains a tremendous inequality in participation and political knowledge. While millions of Americans are engaged as never before as volunteers and debaters, millions more lack the time, the passion, or the patience for such intense engagement. We may be moving toward two economies of political information, one in which voters are intensely involved and informed, and the other in which they are not and are perhaps turned off by the strong opinions and intimidating voices of the well-informed.

I buy into the argument above. The red state/blue state dichotomy is becoming less geographic and more an individual difference. Huge chunks of the country will care less and less, or be less and less involved. But, and this is key, that leaves them open to all kinds of nasty little persuasion tricks. A Republican who looks at the Obama campaign and, if well read in Elaboration Likelihood Model of persuasion, sees the success as a case study in low involvement persuasion can work. Peripheral cues and emotion play well in low-involvement, low-knowledge audiences. The GOP has used this as well. We're going to see a helluva lot more by the next election.