The Internet Generation: Engaged Citizens or Political Dropouts

5: The Political Knowledge of Emerging Generations

5 The Political Knowledge of Emerging Generations G etting the Internet generation to participate politically entails, first and foremost, instilling in them the habit of paying attention to public affairs. The data presented in chapter 4 that show declining turnout to be due largely to this generation’s electoral abstention are worrying enough with regard to the future legitimacy of democracy. Even more worrying is the likelihood that the data reflect a decline in political attentiveness among emerging generations: compulsory voting is a simple policy remedy for low turnout, but there is no equivalent solution for lack of attentiveness. Moreover, the level of voter turnout cannot serve as a cross-national indicator of political attentiveness. Unfortunately neither can the various usual suspects—attitudinal indicators of political interest or efficacy— which are subject to the distortions due to social desirability. The American experiment cited in chapter 1 illustrates this point all too clearly. Just posing political knowledge questions at the beginning of a survey will significantly reduce the number of subjects who report interest in politics. The data on media use set out in chapter 3 give us a useful, if incomplete, basis for comparing political attentiveness cross-nationally. But at the individual level, questions about attentiveness to public affairs in the media are as subject to the distortions of social desirability as are questions of political interest. In order to test whether that interest is actually invested in efforts to gain political information, we need to place political knowledge front and center. What evidence is there that the drop in voting and related forms of political participation since the early 1990s reflects a generational decline in political knowledge? Such evidence can help us answer the question posed at the end of the last chapter: was the rebound in turnout recently witnessed in the United States more than a blip? While it is too early to expect to find political knowledge data to evaluate that 98 // citizens in the making rebound, this chapter will place the question in historical and crossnational context. I do not claim that political knowledge causes electoral participation; this is not something we can readily prove from existing data. But this does not mean that the two are not linked. There is an overwhelming amount of data in support of the “near universal agreement” (Junn 1995, 9) that politically informed people are more likely to vote than those who are not informed, and that voters are likely to be more informed than nonvoters. Comparing Political Knowledge In reviewing the philosophical debate about the meaning of democratic citizenship in chapter 1, we arrived at what might be termed a strong definition of a democratic citizen. It is built upon a key assumption underlying representative democracy: that those entitled to select representatives have sufficient information and skill to compare political parties’ commitments to their own preferences, and weigh the credibility of the commitments in light of the parties’ records. A citizen with such information and skill can reasonably be expected to participate in various forms of political activity. Various empirical studies link declines in voter turnout, membership in and identification with parties, and trust of politicians and political institutions with declines in levels of political knowledge. Numerous studies show that otherwise similar citizens develop significantly different political orientations if they are better informed. Delli Carpini and Keeter (1996) show that people with higher political knowledge can link their personal interests with appropriate public issues, and therefore can select the right person as their representative and can judge officials on the responsibilities they carry in the political system; in contrast, people with lower political knowledge tend to judge officials on their characters and images. Political knowledge increases support for democratic values and political participation (Claes and Hooghe 2008), and dampens the fear of immigrants (Popkin and Dimock 1999). The empirical literature linking political knowledge and political participation relies on plain, inconsistent indicators of political knowledge or ignorance. Yet the literature still shows a positive relationship with voting and other forms of political participation for virtually every indicator of political knowledge used in the research. For example, a simple political knowledge // 99 test used data from the huge Roper Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey of 2000, controlling for education, sex, race, marital status, religion, and group membership. The test showed a strong correlation between the...