Political Knowledge and Policy Representation in the States

• Author: Jeffrey Lyons,William P. Jaeger,Jennifer Wolak
• DOI: 10.1177/1532673X16657806
• Published date: 01 November 2017
• Date: 01 November 2017
• Subject Matter: Articles

American Politics Research

2017, Vol. 45(6) 907 –938

© The Author(s) 2016

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DOI: 10.1177/1532673X16657806

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Article

Political Knowledge and

Policy Representation in

the States

William P. Jaeger1, Jeffrey Lyons2,

and Jennifer Wolak3

Abstract

Political knowledge is central to the success of representative democracy.

However, public policy has been shown to follow public opinion even

despite low levels of political information in the electorate. Does this mean

that political knowledge is irrelevant to policy representation? We consider

whether knowledgeable electorates are better able to achieve representative

policy outcomes. Using the heterogeneity in the responsiveness of

government across the states, we consider how state political knowledge

moderates the connection between citizen ideology and the policy outcomes

of state government. Using national surveys and multilevel logit with post-

stratification, we develop measures of collective political knowledge in

the states. We test whether knowledgeable electorates are more likely

to secure representative political outcomes than less politically informed

constituencies. We find that as state political knowledge increases, so

does the correspondence between the preferences of the public and the

ideological tenor of state policy outcomes.

Keywords

political knowledge, representation, state politics

1Colorado Children’s Campaign, Denver, Colorado, CO, USA

2Boise State University, Boise, Idaho, ID, USA

3University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO, USA

Corresponding Author:

Jennifer Wolak, Department of Political Science, University of Colorado Boulder, 333 UCB,

Boulder, CO 80309-0333, USA.

Email: wolakj@colorado.edu

657806APRXXX10.1177/1532673X16657806American Politics ResearchJaeger et al.

research-article2016

908 American Politics Research 45(6)

Political knowledge is at the heart of representative democracy. If elected

officials are to vote in line with the preferences of their constituents, they

need some knowledge of what the people in their district want. If citizens

are to hold politicians accountable for their choices, they need information

to evaluate how well that representative performs his or her job. Indeed,

debates about the degree to which the U.S. system of government fits a

model of representative democracy often hinge on questions of political

knowledge and information. Citizens delegate political decision-making

power to elected representatives—who may choose to follow the wishes of

their constituents or not. For citizens who want to insure against the risk of

an unresponsive representative, knowledge is a source of political power.

Citizens who hold greater stocks of information and political knowledge

are better equipped to hold representatives accountable as well as generally

take on the challenges of good citizenship. Political information helps citi-

zens form opinions on what they believe in politics and what they think

politicians should do (Krosnick & Milburn, 1990). Political knowledge

helps people communicate their wishes to elected officials and identify

unresponsive politicians (Delli Carpini & Keeter, 1996). Political knowl-

edge is not only central to definitions of good citizenship (Berelson, 1952)

but also has been demonstrated to promote civic competence in practice.

When people are knowledgeable about politics, they make choices at the

ballot box that better reflect their interests (Gelman & King, 1993; Lau,

Andersen, & Redlawsk, 2008). Because knowledgeable citizens demon-

strate more ideological constraint and attitude consistency, they arguably

send sharper signals to politicians about their preferences (Delli Carpini &

Keeter, 1996). Those who hold more political information are also better

able to understand the political stories they see in the news and better pre-

pared to translate their political attitudes into action (Graber, 1984; Popkin

& Dimock, 1999).

Although political information helps citizens meet the demands of citi-

zenship, we do not have decisive evidence that levels of political knowl-

edge promote policy responsiveness. Although individual voters with

political information are better equipped to hold politicians accountable,

this does not guarantee that knowledgeable electorates collectively are

more successful at obtaining representative policy outcomes from elites. In

fact, a common refrain in political science is that ideological policy repre-

sentation comes despite the knowledge levels of the public. Surveys dem-

onstrate the profound limits to Americans’ knowledge of politics—about

20% can name the three branches of government, about half know what a

filibuster is, and usually less than half can name their representative in

Congress (Delli Carpini & Keeter, 1996). But even as people struggle with

Jaeger et al. 909

the facts of how government works, we also see that government responds

to the demands of the public. Public preferences explain the policy out-

comes of government at the national level as well as at the state and local

level (Erikson, Wright, & McIver, 1993; Palus, 2010; Stimson, MacKuen,

& Erikson, 1995).

This suggests that policy responsiveness does not require a knowl-

edgeable public. Instead, citizens might obtain representative policy out-

comes through strategies of low information rationality—using heuristics

to approximate fully informed decision making (Lupia, 1994) or by rely-

ing on online processing, where people can make informed decisions

even absent the ability to recall the specific evidence that informed their

judgment (Lodge, Steenbergen, & Brau, 1995). Policy responsiveness

could also reflect the wisdom of crowds, where the opinions of the collec-

tive are coherent and informative even if many of the underlying opinions

of individuals are nonattitudes or noise (Converse, 1990). Or, policy

responsiveness might be maintained through political institutions that act

in the public interest—whether the collective representation offered by

political parties or the scrutiny of journalists as a check on politicians

(Hochschild, 2010).

We argue that the level of political knowledge held by the public pro-

motes the quality of policy representation. Even though an informed public

may not be a necessity to secure representative outcomes from government,

we believe that it helps. To explore the consequences of political knowledge

for representation, we focus our attention on variations in knowledge across

the states, and how these differences affect the connection between citizen

liberalism and state policy outputs. States are an important case to examine,

given the substantial policy responsibilities held by the states as well as the

trend toward increasing state responsibilities over time. Because both levels

of state political knowledge and the quality of policy representation vary

across the states (Lyons, Jaeger, & Wolak, 2013; Lax & Phillips, 2012;

Pacheco, 2013), examining state policy outcomes provides an excellent

opportunity to examine the quality of representation across contexts. We

expect that when state electorates hold more political information, they

obtain policy outcomes that are closer to their ideological leanings. Using

national surveys and multilevel logit and Poisson models with post-stratifi-

cation, we create multiple measures of state political knowledge. We then

test the conditioning effects of aggregate knowledge on ideological repre-

sentation using variations in public policy outputs across the 50 states. We

find that collective political knowledge strengthens the connection between

citizen ideology and state policy outcomes. Political knowledge promotes

ideological policy representation.