Public Awareness of Congressional Representatives

Tedin, Kent L.; Murray, Richard

doi:10.1177/1532673x7900700408

Cited by 14 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 4 publications

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“…Even were the ANES coding scheme improved, we would have serious reservations about the utility of open-ended questions that ask respondents to recall information in the context of an interview which, we contend, never has a real-world political context. More useful approaches rely upon closed-ended multiple-choice questions (see Mondak 2001;Tedin and Murray 1979). Our 2001 national survey adopted such a measurement strategy.…”

Section: Closed-ended Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…11 Moreover, from the more general vantage of survey research, open-ended questions such as these constitute rigorous and difficult tests of public knowledge. A more reasonable, perhaps fairer, approach is to determine whether people can recognize the names of justices, rather than whether citizens can be remember their names (e.g., Tedin and Murray 1979). 12 After 6 According to an e-mail communication with Pat Luevano of ANES (January 31, 2007), in nearly all surveys since 1986, the ANES interviewers were required to record the verbatim responses of the interviewee.…”

Section: Empirical Evidence Of Mass Ignorancementioning

confidence: 99%

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Knowing the Supreme Court? A Reconsideration of Public Ignorance of the High Court

Gibson¹,

Caldeira²

2009

The Journal of Politics

166

111

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Conventional wisdom holds that the American people are woefully ignorant about law and courts. In light of this putative ignorance, scholars and other commentators have questioned whether the public should play a role in the judicial process-for example, whether public preferences should matter for U.S. Supreme Court confirmation processes. Unfortunately, however, much of what we know-or think we know-about public knowledge of the Supreme Court is based upon flawed measures and procedures. So, for instance, the American National Election Study, a prominent source of the conclusion that people know little if anything about the U.S. Supreme Court, codes as incorrect the reply that William Rehnquist is (was) a justice on the U.S. Supreme Court; respondents, to be judged knowledgeable, must identify Rehnquist as the Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court (which, of course, technically, he was not). More generally, the use of open-ended recall questions leads to a serious and substantial underestimation of the extent to which ordinary people know about the nation's highest court. Our purpose in this paper is to revisit the question of how knowledgeable the American people are about the Supreme Court. Based on two national surveys-using more appropriate, closed-ended questions-we demonstrate that levels of knowledge about the Court and its justices are far higher than nearly all earlier surveys have documented. And, based on an experiment embedded in one of the national surveys, we also show the dramatic effect of question-form on estimates of levels of knowledge. Finally, we draw out the implications of political knowledge for the degree to which people support the U.S. Supreme Court. Our findings indicate that greater knowledge of the Court is associated with stronger loyalty toward the institution. We conclude by reconnecting these findings to ''positivity theory,'' which asserts that paying attention to courts not only provides citizens information, but also exposes them to powerful symbols of judicial legitimacy.

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Section: Closed-ended Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Empirical Evidence Of Mass Ignorancementioning

confidence: 99%

Knowing the Supreme Court? A Reconsideration of Public Ignorance of the High Court

Gibson¹,

Caldeira²

2009

The Journal of Politics

166

111

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…This result illustrates even more strongly that differences in estimated knowledge levels depend less on the choice of open-or closed-ended questions than on the number and difficulty of response options. 10 These results also bear on the recall-recognition distinction in knowledge measurement (e.g., Tedin and Murray 1979). Prior research suggests that open-ended questions measure recall while closed-ended questions measure recognition.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 86%

“…In particular, open-ended questions test ability to recall correct answers, while closed-ended questions instead test ability to recognize the correct answers in a limited set of options (Tedin and Murray 1979). And because open-ended questions lack response options, they offer no frame of reference to anchor respondents' thinking.…”

Section: Knowledge Of the Court In Open-and Closed-ended Questionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Response Options and the Measurement of Political Knowledge

Bullock

Rader

2021

Brit. J. Polit. Sci.

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By many measures, the public knows little about politics. But just how little people seem to know depends on the questions that are put to them. In particular, knowledge levels seem higher when people are asked closed- rather than open-ended questions. In turn, differences between estimated knowledge levels are sometimes attributed to fundamental differences between these types of questions. Building on this previous research, the present study uses a pre-registered experiment conducted with a representative national sample to shed new light on the relationship between question form and knowledge measurement. The authors find that inferences about political knowledge depend less on fundamental differences between open- and closed-ended questions than on two little-appreciated aspects of survey design: the number and difficulty of the response options that accompany closed-ended questions. These aspects of survey design have large effects. Scholars who use the same questions with different response options may reach substantively different conclusions about the public's levels of knowledge.

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“…Rather than being completely ignorant, many respondents may be momentarily unable to quickly recall the right answer or may have vague information about the correct answer. These choice options can serve for respondents to either recognize (Tedin and Murray 1979; Gibson and Caldeira 2009) or recall (Prior and Lupia 2008) the correct answer 9 . We do not consider open-ended items because, according to the conventional wisdom, respondents are much less likely to guess when they are asked to answer open-ended items.…”

Section: Measurement Of Political Knowledge and Guessing Behaviormentioning

confidence: 99%

Modeling Guessing Components in the Measurement of Political Knowledge

Tsai

Lin

2017

Polit. Anal.

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Due to the crucial role of political knowledge in democratic participation, the measurement of political knowledge has been a major concern in the discipline of political science. Common formats used for political knowledge questions include multiple-choice items and open-ended identification questions. The conventional wisdom holds that multiple-choice items induce guessing behavior, which leads to underestimated item-difficulty parameters and biased estimates of political knowledge. This article examines guessing behavior in multiple-choice items and argues that a successful guess requires certain levels of knowledge conditional on the difficulties of items. To deal with this issue, we propose a Bayesian IRT guessing model that accommodates the guessing components of item responses. The proposed model is applied to analyzing survey data in Taiwan, and the results show that the proposed model appropriately describes the guessing components based on respondents’ levels of political knowledge and item characteristics. That is, in general, partially informed respondents are more likely to have a successful guess because well-informed respondents do not need to guess and barely informed ones are highly seducible by the attractive distractors. We also examine the gender gap in political knowledge and find that, even when the guessing effect is accounted for, men are more knowledgeable than women about political affairs, which is consistent with the literature.

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Public Awareness of Congressional Representatives

Cited by 14 publications

References 4 publications

Knowing the Supreme Court? A Reconsideration of Public Ignorance of the High Court

Knowing the Supreme Court? A Reconsideration of Public Ignorance of the High Court

Response Options and the Measurement of Political Knowledge

Modeling Guessing Components in the Measurement of Political Knowledge

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