Remember that thing about framing?

Fox News headline this morning: "Obama's Debt Reduction Plan: TAX HIKES". (Caps theirs.)

Huff Post: "OBAMA TO GOP: END TAX BREAKS FOR MILLIONAIRES, OIL COMPANIES".

LA Times: "Obama challenges GOP on tax breaks at press conference".

Wa Post: "Obama urges GOP to agree to tax increases".

MSNBC: "OBAMA TO CONGRESS ON DEBT TALKS: 'GET IT DONE'".

Think about how the different headlines will affect people's views. Also think about whether the headline writers had anything in mind—consciously or unconsciously—when they wrote them.

Read my post on framing, priming, and manipulation here.

People Are Ignorant. Big Deal, Right? Well, Yeah.

We've been on the theme of political ignorance for nearly a month now, and so far we've concluded that people are generally pretty ignorant, but we don't yet understand whether this is such a bad thing. Recall from last time there were three arguments about whether political ignorance matters.

1) People don't need to know all the details as long as they know enough to figure out what's best for them.

2) People don't need to know very much as long as the voting public as a whole gets the answer right.

3) On the other hand, it's not about whether people can get by or whether groups get things right—it's about making sure everyone's voice is heard, and those with more knowledge have an easier time getting their voices heard.

We looked last time at the first argument and concluded there might be something to it, but maybe only when voters know what they want and who shares those wants. Then, they can infer what choices to make based on who endorses a policy proposal. This could work—in fact, did work in at least one case—in things like voter referenda, but might not work so well when choosing between political candidates.

Today, I'll look at the second argument. Then I will tear in to it until it runs screaming and bloody back from whence it came.

Maybe groups get it right, but probably not, or: How applying basic statistics seems clever but can go horribly wrong

One hope is that even though people don't know much by themselves, as a group they do. You may have heard of this idea under the title "the wisdom of crowds," and in some cases it might work. In politics, the idea is that no individual voter has a very good idea which candidate is best, but by voting, people can contribute their (largely inaccurate) information to a greater whole, and that greater whole might be accurate. We're going to see how the argument can go wrong, but first let's go through it in more detail.

Underlying this version of the wisdom-of-crowds argument is something called the central limit theorem, one of the most important results in statistics. It's an idea best conveyed by an example. Suppose you're part of a Science Bowl team tasked with estimating the size of a watermelon. If any one member of your team estimates the size, that estimate will surely be off by a little bit. But let's say that everyone writes down an estimate, and then you, as team captain, read them and average them together. Everyone's estimate will be off, but some people will overestimate and others will underestimate. As long as there aren't any systematic biases in the way people estimate, these over- and underestimates balance each other out, so the average will be likely be pretty accurate. Not only that, the team as a whole will be much more certain because everyone has contributed their estimates. Think of it this way. If one or two people say the watermelon is about six feet around, you might not be so confident, but if eight people say it's about six feet around, you'll start to be pretty confident of the watermelon's size.

In politics, the wisdom of crowds idea is that people might have what's called private information about candidates, that is, their own personal estimates of the relative quality of two candidates. By voting, they are saying, "I think candidate X is the better quality candidate," and by summing up everyone's votes, the group as a whole can get a good idea of who the best candidate actually is.

Unfortunately, the central limit theorem/wisdom of crowds argument makes two implicit assumptions that work in the watermelon example (as I've described it) but are dubious at best in politics.

The first is the assumption that the voting public all want the same thing, that is, that they all want to find the highest quality candidate. In reality, not everyone wants the same things. Some people want more environmental regulation. Some people want to build big houses on little mountains overlooking Malibu. Everyone surely wants to figure out the best candidate, but by "best" they can mean different things.

Maybe we could get around this "politics is not watermelon-size estimation" problem, but even then we would have a more pernicious problem, namely that our beliefs about watermelons and politicians depend on others' beliefs. If that's the case, the central limit theorem argument no longer applies because aggregating everyone's beliefs won't do anything to cancel out the mistakes that individuals make.

Here's an example, called an information cascade, of how interdependent beliefs mess things up. Let's say you're wandering around 9th and Irving in San Francisco patiently looking for somewhere good to eat. You notice Pasquale's Pizzeria, some sushi joint, and Crepe Vine, but then you notice the crowd outside Park Chow. Reasonably assuming that other people also want somewhere good to eat, you infer that Park Chow must have some tasty bites, so you hop in line and prepare to eat the best spaghetti and meatballs in the universe. (Okay, I'm biased, but they are good.)

Here's the fun fact: each person in the line might be there for the same reason as you. Why? Let's say everybody was just looking for a good place to eat, but nobody knew where to go. One guy picks Park Chow. Then, some other person comes along, figures that first guy knows something she doesn't, and heads to Park Chow (she'll take the Smiling Noodles, please). Pretty soon the whole of the Inner Sunset is waiting on a strangely narrow sidewalk near Golden Gate Park waiting to eat.

What's the point of all this? The point is, let's say your "friend" tells you that Obama is a socialist. You figure he's not dumb and knows something you don't, so you believe him. Pretty soon, the idea becomes sort of popular, and other people start thinking a million people can't be wrong. Guess what. They are. An information cascades is only one kind of interdependent-beliefs problem, but it's a nasty one.

A related issue is anchoring, where people's estimates can depend on not just other people's estimates, but also completely random numbers. For example, some decades ago, psychologists showed they could affect estimates of US spending on the United Nations with a Roulette wheel. Some time I'll say more about this one.

To sum up, the wisdom of crowds idea is an appealing one, and it might work for some things, but it depends on a number of assumptions that probably don't hold up, at least in politics. First, people aren't trying to figure out how to get what's best—they don't even agree on what "best" means. Second, their beliefs depend on each others', so rather than actually aggregating a bunch of independent pieces of information, they might just be going off what the first guy says. Third, their beliefs are easily swayed by random, irrelevant information. It all ends up to a strong argument against crowds being in any sense wise.

More next time. Stay tuned.

Nathan Answers Questions: What About Manipulation?

Over on Facebook, reader Jonathan Wang asks,

"…how about cases where politicians or interest groups deliberately misrepresent the facts?"

It's a good question with a number of facets. Three issues come to mind immediately: framing, media priming, and the many ways in which people either ignore or fail to use new information that could correct false beliefs.

Here's a quick overview, with some examples. Well, we'll see about quick, but there will be examples.

Framing
Back in the 70s, psychologists—notably Amos Tversky and Danny Kahneman—got interested in how people actually made decisions. (If this sounds like an obvious thing to do, let me assure that economists of the day were more interested in how people should make decisions. Many still are.) I'm going to explain what framing is in terms of a classic psychology experiment, and then I'll explain what it has to do with politics.

Here's the experiment. There's a horrible disease that, if no one does anything, will kill 600 people, and there are two programs to combat the disease. Program A will save 200 people, while Program B might save everyone, but there's a two-thirds chance no one will be saved. Something like three-quarters of the people in the experiment who faced this choice went for Program A, the option with certainty. This much is easy to explain. The options are equivalent in the sense that if we repeated the situation many times, on average 200 people would be saved using either program, but people favor the certainty of Program A over the gamble of B. Economists call this risk aversion, and they'd thought about it well before the psychologists did.

But here's where things go wrong for the economists. Kahneman and Tversky presented another group with these choices: Program C, in which 400 will die, or Program D, in which there is a two-thirds everyone will die.

See what they did? Programs A and C are exactly the same, as are B and D, but they're described differently. When you describe them in terms of death—Programs C and D—about three-quarters of the participants in the experiment favor the gamble over certain deaths.

The lesson for politics is that how you frame something—in this case, whether you talk about saving people or letting people die—affects the choices people make. Politicians know this. There's a reason, for example, you hear about pro-choice and pro-life: anti-life and anti-choice, or baby killer and woman hater for that matter, don't sound so good. A more recent (and vastly more politically relevant) example concerns natural resources: drilling for oil versus energy exploration.

At this point, you're probably thinking that this is kind of obvious. Maybe so, but no matter. It works, and it's likely working on you right now. Homework: read a newspaper—you read all of them, right?—and look to see how politicians talk about the issues. It turns out you can tell whether someone is a Republican or Democrat by the words they use. Look up my colleagues Daniel Diermeier or John Wilkerson if you'd like to know more about that.

Media Priming
Also back in the 1970s, the prevailing wisdom among political psychologists and communications scholars was the "minimal effects" hypothesis: empirically, it appeared that media did not change what people believed about politicians very much.

Then, in 1982, along came Shanto Iyengar, Mark Peters, and Don Kinder, people trained in standard Michigan-school political psychology but with a new idea: media might not affect what people believe, but it might affect how they evaluate politicians by changing the basis of the evaluation. In one early experiment, they showed they could change how important people thought an issue was simply by showing them a news broadcast with more coverage of that issue. Not only that, it changed how people evaluated the president.

So, for example, when they presented a news broadcast with more coverage of defense issues, people's overall ratings of then-President Carter were very highly correlated with their ratings of him on defense. The correlation didn't vanish when the news coverage was on other issues, but it did drop substantially.

The lasting effects of misleading reports and blatant lies
So far, we've seen that politicians and media can have a profound effect on the preferences people express by reshaping what they think about (media priming) and how they think about it (framing). Now, what do people remember?

An unfortunate fact is that people don't always remember the truth even after they've been told it in no uncertain terms. Well after the invasion of Iraq in 2003 failed to uncover weapons of mass destruction, for example, many Americans still believed there were WMDs there.

There are at least two ways to account for this. First, people might simply not have been exposed to the new information. That is, maybe it was in no uncertain terms, but they were watching American Idol.

The second way—really it's a set of ways—is more distressing: for a variety of reasons, people tend to reject new information that's inconsistent with what they already believe. One of these reasons is called motivated reasoning, which says that when people are exposed to information that counters their beliefs, they have a negative, emotional reaction to it and tend to discredit it. The source also matters—partisans may tend to discredit officials from the opposing party and hence discredit anything they say. This is a case of what's called cognitive dissonance—we don't want to believe someone we dislike could have anything useful to say, so we just don't believe it. Finally, there is a cognitive tendency, called confirmation bias, to discredit anything inconsistent with what you've already observed. (I have long suspected these are all aspects of a single cognitive process, but to my knowledge no one has actually demonstrated this, either experimentally or theoretically.)

The political science literature is a bit thin on these issues when it comes to correcting demonstrably false beliefs such as a belief in the existence of WMDs in Iraq—most of the science concerns political messages rather than facts per se—but there is a lovely experiment by Ross, Lepper, and Hubbard from 1975 that illustrates the ideas. These three had a group of people take a test, which they then scored. After seeing the scores, the test takers reported whether they felt they were more or less skilled than the average person when it came to the material on the test. It turned out, however, that the scores were completely random—they had nothing to do with how people actually did on the tests. Now here's the kicker: telling the test takers that their scores were random had no effect on their beliefs about their own skills and intelligence.

What does all this mean? Well, it means that not only are people fairly easy to manipulate, but those manipulations might have long-lasting effects. I have no pithy closing remark. This topic is a little too disheartening for that sort of thing.




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People Are Ignorant. Big Deal...Right?

In my previous three posts, I wrote about the fact that people generally don't know much about politics, though there is variance, and I wrote about why people know what they know. Basically, learning about politics takes effort, so people only know the things that are the easiest to learn about, which isn't much.

Okay, so people don't know much about politics, and we have some idea why. Today and next time, I'll look at whether it actually matters. In particular, I'll look at whether individuals and societies can make good decisions in spite of their ignorance. Roughly, there are three arguments:

1) People don't need to know all the details as long as they know enough to figure out what's best for them.

2) People don't need to know very much as long as the voting public as a whole gets the answer right.

3) On the other hand, it isn't about whether people can get by or whether voters get things right in some sense—it's about making sure everyone's voice is heard, and those with more knowledge have an easier time getting their voices heard.

These points aren't mutually exclusive. It could be that individuals can make good decisions based on limited knowledge but that some of them don't get their say because they don't know how to register to vote—that counts as political knowledge, too.

More than most of what I write here, the questions and issues I'll raise are still under debate. You can participate in that debate—I welcome your thoughts in the comments below. Remember to be nice to each other and don't take anything personally. Now on to the first argument.

Knowing enough to make the right choice
One point of view of democracy is that it's not about having an intellectual public that discusses and dissects everything going on. Requiring such things, I suppose, might tread too closely to requiring people to pass a test to vote or having an intellectual ruling class like that in Plato's The Republic. It's a fair point. Not everyone has the time and energy to deal with the details of politics, and that doesn't necessarily mean they shouldn't have a say.

Instead, people like Sam Popkin and Paul Sniderman argue, people need to know just enough about a policy to understand whether it's good for them, and they don't need a lot to do that. For example, they can use shortcuts, or "heuristics," like party or interest group endorsements to get the information they need. Furthermore, the system might be set up to provide people with exactly these kinds of shortcuts.

A good example of the shortcuts idea is a 1994 paper by Arthur Lupia, in which he studied insurance reform initiatives on the 1988 ballot in California. Each initiative claimed it would lower California's high auto insurance rates, but voters had an onerous task: there were five—five!—such initiatives, and they were complicated. Key to Lupia's analysis, they also had diverse sources of support. A consumer group called Voter Revolt sponsored the winning initiative, Proposition 103. Trial lawyers sponsored one, and insurance companies sponsored the other three.

Lupia argued that people didn't need to understand every detail of the initiatives as long as they knew who sponsored which initiative, and he had evidence to back that up. Using surveys, he looked both at voters' knowledge of the proposals and whether they knew the initiatives' sponsors. People who knew the sponsors, Lupia found, voted the same as those who knew all the details. In other words, ignorant people can at least get by if they have a clue as to whether a policy is good for them. In this case, if the insurance industry supports it, it probably won't lower your insurance rates. (Fun fact: political scientists and psychologists use "cue," meaning a small piece of information, in place of "clue," meaning hint.)

Paul Sniderman and Simon Jackman, professors of mine from Stanford, took this a step further and argued that the U.S. system is set up to help people make decisions by giving them one giant cue—party endorsements. The two-party system, they claim, makes it easy for voters to decide between candidates and policies because it makes it easy to understand what those candidates and policies stand for. In a time when the parties overlap less and less, this makes some sense: the parties are different, and people can draw inferences from those differences.

Now, not everyone buys these arguments. Princeton political scientist Larry Bartels, for example, looked at some other surveys and showed that the well-informed do vote differently from the poorly-informed, all other things being equal. This may be an issue of focus—Lupia looked at insurance reform initiatives, while Bartels studied congressional elections. In the former, everyone has a clear interest in a particular outcome, namely lower insurance rates, and it's easy to see that insurance companies probably don't want what you want. In the latter, even if you know what you want, knowing which party will get you there isn't necessarily so clear.

The difference, I think, is the Downs argument, redux: the easier something is to understand, the more likely people are to understand it. By extension, the easier something is to understand, the more likely people are to make good decisions. So, people can get by on a little knowledge sometimes, but maybe not when it comes to choosing who to represent them in government.

I'll leave it at that for today. Next time, the wisdom of crowds and related arguments, and the big downer regarding demographics, knowledge, and participation. Stay tuned.




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Why People Know What They Know About Politics

In my two previous posts, I looked at what people know about politics, and I looked a bit at who knows what about politics. The general theme is that people don't know very much overall, but there's variation—people know more about some things than others, and some people know more than others.

Today, I want to look at why people know what they know, and fortunately we've already seen some hints at the explanation. For example, we've seen that more people know about high-profile issues than about others. Putting that together with everything else we've seen so far suggests a fairly simple explanation for why people don't know that much about politics: it's actually kind of hard to follow, and most people have better things—or at least more pleasant things—to do than think about the awful state of the economy or whether gay people should be allowed to marry each other.

This is an argument that Anthony Downs first put forth in his 1957 book An Economic Theory of Democracy. According to Downs, the costs and benefits of learning about politics are such that people will know what someone hands them—and Downs meant this literally. So, people will know something they read in a pamphlet a political activist handed them, they'll know something they saw in a political ad, and so forth. They know these things and little else because they just don't want to take the effort to learn much else.

Researchers don't always state their arguments in such terms, but costs and benefits are often there. I mentioned Verba, Schlozman, and Brady's book Voice and Equality in a previous post. Their argument is about resources—in order to know something about politics and participate effectively in it, people need resources. Why do they need resources? They need resources because learning about and understanding politics is a costly endeavor in terms of the time and effort required.

Now, how does Downs's argument explain the facts we've observed? There are three main ideas. First, learning about politics takes effort—in economic terms, it's costly—but some things take more effort than others. Second, people have different resources at their disposal to spend, so to speak, on learning about politics. Third, people differ in how much they care about politics. That is, some people get more of an intrinsic benefit from learning about politics than others. Let's see how this plays out in three examples.

One observaton we made was that more people know about high-profile issues like the "don't ask, don't tell" policy on gays in the military than about low-profile issues. The reason might by now be obvious. Almost by definition, a high-profile issue is easier to find out about than a low-profile one—the issue is everywhere on TV and in the papers, so you don't have to do any digging to find out about it. In the Downsian way of thinking, it costs less to learn about a high-profile issue compared to low-profile ones.

Another factor is education. In at least two ways, being more educated is related to having more resources to spend on learning about politics. The standard argument goes that education gives you the skills to learn about and understand politics. Education also tends to go along with being more a rich white male or, to use the technical term, being of huger socioeconomic status. People of higher socioeconomic status tend to have more free time—they're the ones reading and writing science blogs, not the ones working two jobs to get by. Regardless, more educated people tend to have more resources to spend on learning about politics, either because they more to begin with (the usual argument) or more left over at the end of the day (the SES argument).

(There's actually a third way to think about education: by giving people skills to acquire and process political information, it reduces the costs of learning about politics. If we think about people having to dig less to find out about high profile issues, then in this sense education makes the digging easier. In contrast, the first argument about education says that you have more time to dig.)

Last but not least, how can we understand the effect of paying attention to and discussing politics? This comes down to the benefits people get out of knowing things about politics. Chances are, if you read newspapers and talk with your friends and colleagues about what you read, you actually care about politics. Heaven forbid, but you might even like politics. Either way, you find learning about and understanding politics intrinsically valuable. Using the digging analogy, you might think there's buried treasure, or you might just enjoy the digging.

So, the generally low levels of political knowledge people have as well as who knows what about politics likely comes down to costs and benefits. If the information is easy to come by, people are more likely to know it. If people have an easier time learning and understanding that information, they're more likely to know it. And if people actually enjoy or at least value knowing stuff about politics, they're more likely to know it. In other words, if the knowledge is less costly to learn, people have more resources to learn it, or they value learning it, then they are more likely to learn it.

If this is a dismal picture, it should at least not be surprising. After all, most people really don't have the time and inclination to deal with politics, and even if they did, they might reasonably think that no one will listen to them anyway. (Actually, they might be right, but we'll get to that later.) The question remains whether it matters. For a long time, people simply assumed that it did, but over the last few decades, a number of people have challenged that view. More on that in future posts.

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One other thing about what people know…

One of the things I didn't mention last time is that people tend to forget the issues and the politicians of yesterday, and that at least partially accounts for Americans' lack of political knowledge. Apropos, former Senator Rick Santorum, who lost his seat in a 17 point loss in 2006 — which, I should point out, is an unusual loss and an unusually huge landslide — is running for President.

Santorum used to be a Republican superstar. Today, according to Pew, fewer than half of Republican-leaning voters even know who he is.

You can read about Santorum's announcement here.

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A Look at What People Know About Politics, Part 2: What We Know and Who Knows It.

Last time, I wrote about what Americans and others know about politics. Before I get to discussing why people don't know much about politics—and whether it even matters—let's take a closer look at how much people know, whether it's changed over time, and who knows what. I'll also look a bit at whether the measures of political knowledge people use are actually that useful.

A lot of what I'm going to talk about today comes from Michael X. Delli Carpini and Scott Keeter's book What Americans Know About Politics and Why It Matters, a standard textbook for graduate-level introductions to American politics. Like a lot of graduate-level introductions to American politics, it has some drawbacks. First, it is now 15 years old, and the most recent data they analyze is about twenty years old. Second, there are some legitimate concerns about how they measured knowledge, how to compare knowledge levels across time and across countries, and so forth. However, it is the most comprehensive study of what Americans know about politics you're likely to find, in part because of the measurement and comparison issues. Much of the research that has come since has focused on how to measure what people know rather than simply measuring what they know. (Some time, I'll write about measurement problems in social science, or why physics had it easy and ignorance is sometimes a good thing.)

What do people know?
The general picture so far is that people don't know much, and while that's true, there's also a great deal more nuance to explore. Here's a summary of what Delli Carpini and Keeter found:

1) While Americans don't know much about politics—for example, only 41 percent of 2,000 questions asked over a period of several decades were correctly answered by more than half of the people surveyed—there is a tremendous amount of variation from issue to issue and question to question. When asked in the mid- to late-1980s, 96 percent of Americans knew that the US was a UN member state (a number not much changed from the 1940s), 50 percent knew that the accused are presumed innocent, and two percent could name two Fifth Amendment rights.

2) People generally fare less well when it comes to details about their leaders and institutions. At the time of their Survey of Political Knowledge, fewer than three quarters of Americans could identify any position a public official had taken, with two exceptions. More than the three quarters knew what Bill Clinton's "don't ask, don't tell" policy was, and more than three quarters knew that George H. W. Bush didn't like broccoli.

3) Even though people don't know that much, their answers often tend to cluster roughly around the correct answer. In 1989, the most frequent belief about the proportion of the federal budget devoted to defense was 30 percent, not too far off from the correct answer, 26 percent. The distributions are broad and a bit off in terms of the average answer, but, write Delli Carpini and Keeter, the average American isn't too far off. This point will be key in one of the arguments that American political ignorance is not so disastrous.

4) Political knowledge is not unique. In fact, the levels of knowledge regarding culture, popular and otherwise, were similar. In 1989, only 16 percent of Americans knew the Giants had won a Superbowl that decade. (They had won three years earlier.) Again, there is variation: in 1975, 89 percent knew who Shakespeare was, while in 1982, only six percent knew Jackson Pollock was a painter. (That one makes me sad. Not so much disturbed. Just sad.)

If you see some patterns emerging, well, they are. People tend to know things that are particularly high profile. Shakespeare is higher profile than Pollock. "Don't ask, don't tell" was higher profile than most any policy from the 1990s—so much so that we're still talking about it. And the one big Fifth Amendment right—the one against self-incrimination—is the one that even TV shows talk about. They don't tend to talk so much about grand jury indictments, double jeopardy, due process, or the takings clause, which requires the government to pay you for property that it seizes through eminent domain.

A final point: most people are fairly uniformly knowledgeable. While there are a few "information specialists," who know a lot about one particular area, most people know, to paraphrase Peggy Lee, a little bit about a lot of things. (If you pick up the book, you'll mysteriously find this observation at the beginning of the chapter on who is informed about politics.)

What do Americans know in comparison to other countries?
Again, the story is fairly incomplete, but we know a few things. In comparison to other countries, Americans don't do so well, but there are bright spots. In a 1986 survey of knowledge about foreign affairs, Americans did about as well as Canada and United Kingdom and better than Spain and Mexico. According to Almond and Verba's The Civic Culture—a book that I could write a book about—Americans and Germans are much better than others at naming party leaders and cabinet offices. Finally, a 1988 National Geographic Survey found that Americans were sort of middle of the pack at locating important places, such as the United States and the Persian Gulf.

Who knows about politics?
There are a handful of individual traits that, if you have them, make you more likely to know a lot about politics across the board. One of them is simply discussing politics: the more you talk about politics, the more you know about politics.

Another is education: roughly, if you have more years of education behind you, you're more likely to know the rules of the game, the substance of political debates, and who the players are. I don't know that anyone's ever dug into this in a rigorous way, but the argument for why education matters is simple enough—the more education you have, the more you're able to digest and analyze political information. (And, psychologists know, digesting and analyzing information is central to actually retaining it.)

I am a bit skeptical of that argument, however, and here's where things start to get distressing. The hope of the education argument is that if people have access to education, they'll be more active and informed citizens. (Sidney Verba, Kay Schlozmann, and Henry Brady make such an argument in their book Voice and Equality.) The trouble is, higher education tends to go along with two things that ought to have nothing to do with the capacity to participate meaningfully in politics: income and race.

Indeed, higher income tends to lead to higher levels of political knowledge, possibly because it means you have a greater interest in the outcomes of political debates, or maybe because you simply have more spare time and energy to devote to following politics. What causes what, as is often the case in social science, is tricky: maybe you have higher levels of knowledge and income because you're educated. Maybe you have more knowledge and education because you're wealthy. But until we sort that out, I'm still distressed.

And the worst of all: race and, while we're at it, gender. Blacks and women—at least at the time of the Survey of Political Knowledge—knew substantially less about politics than others. Again, there's a lot of variation, but on average white men know quite a bit more. Nor, argue Delli Carpini and Keeter, have these gaps declined much over the years, as one might hope given the trend toward more education—another reason to doubt that education is the great equalizer.

One final point. People who read about politics in the newspaper know more about politics than others, but only when it comes to a particular area: the people and political parties involved in politics. In other words, reading the newspaper doesn't seem to help people understand how politics works or the substance of political issues. As Delli Carpini and Keeter point out, knowledge and understanding of politics depends not only on the will to learn about politics and the resources to achieve that goal, but also the opportunity to learn about it in the first place.