Abstract
Political knowledge is the primary indicator of political sophistication, which refers to expertise in the realm of politics. Sophisticated individuals hold more accurate, stable, and consistent political opinions and display many behaviors that are widely considered conducive for democracy. Political knowledge is also largely synonymous with political awareness. For methodological and pragmatic reasons, it would often be convenient to assess individuals’ knowledge about politics through survey self-assessments. Surveys are increasingly conducted online without supervision by a professional interviewer, which makes it impossible to reliably ask knowledge questions due to googling. Self-assessments offer a potential way around the problem, but their reliability has not yet been ascertained. The scarce evidence about the accuracy of such evaluations and research on cognitive biases suggests that they are likely to be inaccurate. This article offers evidence of the accuracy of self-assessments of political sophistication among various sociodemographic groups. The analysis makes use of recently gathered data focusing on political sophistication in Finland among a representative sample of the voting age population. The findings offer some optimism regarding self-assessments as a proxy for more extensive measures of political awareness. However, age and gender-related differences in accuracy are cause for some concern.
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Rapeli, L. (2022). Accuracy of Self-Assessments of Political Sophistication. In: Kristensen, N.N., Denk, T., Olson, M., Solhaug, T. (eds) Perspectives on Political Awareness. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-90394-7_6
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