Abstract: Individuals' knowledge about current law on the hot-button social issues of same-sex marriage, abortion, and gun control is better explained by a new ...
People Know What They Know: Self-Assessments of Political Knowledge on Hot Button Social Issues
Dean Lacy Dartmouth College Qian (Sisy) Wang Dartmouth College
Abstract: Individuals' knowledge about current law on the hot-button social issues of same-sex marriage, abortion, and gun control is better explained by a new measure of self-assessed knowledge of an issue and by their own policy preferences than by general levels of political knowledge (via a Delli-Carpini & Keeter scale). About one third of respondents to a 2004 survey were incorrect about state laws on same sex marriage, abortion, and gun control. People are more likely to believe incorrectly that the law is on their side of the issue than to believe it is against them. General political information measures often miss policy-specific knowledge on hot-button social issues. Self-reported knowledge is a simple and accurate measure of political information. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Toronto, Ontario, September 2-6, 2009.
One of the least controversial propositions in the social sciences is that most people know very little about politics. Countless books and articles – focusing mostly on US politics -- show that surprisingly few people are familiar with current events, prominent political figures, political institutions, or geography (e.g., Delli Carpini & Keeter 1996). Most of this research focuses on public knowledge of political processes and people, particularly at the national and international levels. Very little research examines how much people know about public policies or the law, which are arguably more important for an informed public than knowledge of people or institutions. The gold standard for measuring political information in public opinion surveys is a set of five questions developed by Delli-Carpini and Keeter. Most public opinion surveys that include a measure of political knowledge include some variation of five questions asking respondents to name the current Vice President, the party with a majority in the House of Representatives, the political party that is more liberal, the percentage vote required in Congress to override a presidential veto, and the branch of government that decides whether a law is constitutional. The five questions usually generate a near-uniform distribution of responses across a six point scale: Roughly one sixth of survey respondents answer none of the questions correctly, and only about a sixth can answer all five of the questions. The “Delli-Carpini and Keeter Five” are very useful for creating maximal variation in respondents’ information scores in a minimal number of questions, a sort of “Name That Tune” exercise giving us the most information about people with the fewest number of survey questions. Despite the strength and ingenuity of the questions, their usefulness in predicting knowledge of specific public policies and laws has not been tested extensively.
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It is also not well known whether people who answer correctly (or incorrectly) to questions about law and public policy do so by projecting their own opinions onto law and policy. People who answer a question correctly may do so only because they expect public policy agrees with their own opinions. It is also possible that people may answer incorrectly because they believe public policy must be against them. This link between people’s own opinions on issues and their beliefs about the state of current policy or law has seen little attention in the large literature on political information. Based on a set of surveys conducted in the US during the 2004 elections, we find that only about a third of the public does not know federal and state law on high profile issues, including abortion, same sex marriage, and gun ownership. However, individuals’ scores on the Delli-Carpini and Keeter information battery do not explain their knowledge of the law on these issues. Public knowledge of these high profile issues appears to be unrelated to general knowledge of political leaders and institutions. We propose a new measure of political information—a respondent’s self-reported knowledge of an issue—that better predicts whether a person knows the law on most of these issues. We also find that respondents are more likely to believe the law is “on their side.” These findings imply that political knowledge is more complex than previously believed, that a new measure of self-described political knowledge may be useful to researchers, and that people project their own opinions about what should be legal onto the legal system.
Do People Know the Law? Political information—or knowledge or sophistication, concepts often used interchangeably—clearly varies across people. Some people seem to know a lot about
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politics, others know very little. The impact of political sophistication on political attitudes and behavior is well documented (Converse 1964, Zaller 1992, Bartels 1996, Bennett 2003).
Measuring polititical knowledge or sophistication has been more
controversial, with a new article every year or so recommending a different method for measuring political knowledge (Luskin 1987, Zaller 1992, Delli Carpini and Keeter 1993, Delli Carpini and Keeter 1996, Bartels 1996, Mondak 2001, Mondak and Anderson 2004). Despite the many articles recommending a new measure of political information, all are rather narrowly focused on two methods: the number of factual questions about politics a respondent can answer correctly, or a survey interviewer’s assessment of a respondent’s level of sophistication. The widely used factual knowledge questions are particularly narrow, focused on naming political leaders and understanding the operation of political institutions. The most significant controversies in the measurement of political information entail the treatment of “don’t know” responses (studies show men are more likely to guess than women, Mondak 2001, Mondak and Anderson 2004), the number of questions needed to fully account for variation in information levels (Delli Carpini and Keeter 1993, 1996), or the usefulness and comparability of interviewer’s ratings of respondents (Zaller 1992, Bartels 1996). Measures of political knowledge or sophistication frequently overlook a key type of knowledge: knowledge of laws, particularly at the state level, since state laws have an arguably larger effect on the daily lives of US citizens. For instance, Delli Carpini and Keeter inventory the 350 different questions tapping political knowledge that appeared in various US public opinion surveys between 1945 and 1990. Of these questions, over 30 percent focus on political leaders, 22 percent on international affairs, 20 percent on
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political institutions and processes. Only 13 percent focus on knowledge of public policies and domestic politics. Ten percent have focused on questions of geography, 4 percent on history, again with a focus on historical leaders. Of the total of 47 questions about domestic policy that appeared on surveys during this time frame, none asked about specific laws. Most ask about inflation and unemployment rates, Social Security, the national debt, and spending on general social programs. Among the questions about political institutions and processes, about half a dozen ask about the legal process, such as whether a person has a right to a trial by jury, whether people have a Constitutional right to an attorney, and whether a person is innocent until proven guilty. On balance, the decades-long quest to measure Americans’ political information shows a focus on political leaders and institutions. In a democratic society, this is probably not be the kind of information most worth citizens’ time to gather and survey researchers’ time to uncover. Knowledge of the law is arguably the most important component of political knowledge. Since “ignorance of the law is no excuse,” it is undoubtedly important that everyone know the law. In this study, we focus on knowledge of the law on three significant social issues on which the law was changing, usually in widely publicized ways, during recent US elections: abortion, same sex marriage, and the gun ownership. We chose these three issues for several reasons. They are high profile issues about which the news media regularly report and political leaders usually take positions. They are issues people often care about greatly, earning the title of “hot-button” issues, and they often matter in the voting booth. They are generally not technical issues, such as tort reform, patent law, or corporate mergers, about which we should not expect the general
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public to have a great deal of knowledge. They are also not mundane issues such as traffic laws. We could pick hundreds of specific legal issues from the speed limit to the drinking age to the difference between assault and battery to use as measures of knowledge of the law. Laws on same sex marriage, abortion, and gun ownership are inherently more politically interesting and contentious. Same sex marriage, abortion, and gun laws also have the potential to vary some across states. Many legal issues such as traffic laws, gambling, torts, and estates and inheritances vary across states. Other issues such as the right to trial, freedom of speech and assembly, and the right to due process are enshrined in the Constitution and made uniform—at least in theory—across the states. Same sex marriage, abortion, and gun laws inhabit a middle ground where the federal government has established somewhat narrow parameters within which state laws can vary. Same sex marriage became an intensely debated topic during the 2004 election season after the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court in November of 2003 required the state legislature to enact same sex marriage. In February and early March of 2004, the city of San Francisco, CA, issued same sex marriage licenses. In May of 2004, same sex marriage became legal in Massachusetts. In August 2004, the California Supreme Court ruled that marriage licenses issued by the city of San Francisco were not legal. Prior to this flurry of activity on the issue, the Vermont Supreme Court had ruled in 1999 that exclusion of same sex couples from benefits similar to those of married couples violated the state constitution. California, Hawaii, Maine, and New Jersey had similar court decisions requiring that benefits available to married couple must also be made available to same sex couples. By the fall of 2004, Massachusetts was the only state to allow same
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sex marriage, while California, Hawaii, Maine, New Jersey, and Vermont allowed domestic partner benefits but not marriage. No other states permitted same sex marriage or required extension of marital benefits to same sex couples. During a survey in the field during the 2004 election campaign, we asked a sample of US residents the following question in the post-election wave of a three-wave panel survey,1 “According to the laws of the state you live in, are gay and lesbian couples, (1) allowed to get married and have all of the same legal rights and benefits as any other married couples, (2) allowed to have domestic partnerships that provide some legal benefits such as inheriting money from a partner and receiving family health insurance, but not be allowed to have the legal status of marriage, or (3) not allowed to get married or have domestic partnerships or anything else that makes their relationships legal?” Seventy-five percent of the 902 subjects who completed the third wave of the survey correctly identified the laws of their state on same sex marriage. Since the question appeared at the end of the third wave of a panel survey, respondents may have been conditioned by participation in the survey to pay more attention to the news and to think about the issue of same sex marriage. The third wave survey included 203 respondents from a fresh sample who did not participate in the earlier waves. Of the fresh sample, 74 1
The survey included three waves, in April - May, October, and November -December of 2004. Wave 1 of the survey had 1519 panel members aged 18 and over, representative of the US population (Field Report 2004:4). The respondents were recruited using Random Digit Dialing, with the phone numbers screened for disconnected numbers as well as numbers without WebTV Internet Service, which excludes 6-8% of the US population (Field Report 2004: 9). Households that agreed to participate were supplied with a WebTV unit, which allow respondents to take surveys online on their own time (Field Report 2004:10). The study compensated participants with points redeemable for cash or sweepstakes drawings. Wave 3 participants consisted of 699 people from Wave 1 and 203 people from a fresh cross section sample (Field Report 2004:4).
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percent correctly identified the laws of their states, which is not statistically different from the percentage correct in the panel sample (χ2=.48, p=.49). Gun laws were much less publicized during the 2004 campaign, but still very significant. The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 made it “unlawful to manufacture, transfer, or possess a semiautomatic assault weapon.” While loopholes in the law allowed an aftermarket of a few styles of automatic weapons manufactured before the ban, the intention and effect of the law, when coupled with other provisions, was to prevent people from purchasing or selling assault weapons. The provision of the law known as the “assault weapons ban” had a ten-year sunset provision that allowed the law to expire on September 13, 2004 unless renewed, which it was not. The second wave of the 2004 Knowledge Networks survey went into the field four days later, on September 17. In both the second and third (post-election) waves of the survey, we asked respondents: “Do you think the government currently prohibits people in the U.S. from buying military-style assault weapons or machine guns?” In the September-October wave of the survey, 68 percent of respondents identified that the law no longer prohibited people from buying military-style assault weapons. However, seven states had laws banning assault weapons in 2004, and their laws remained in effect at the state level. Respondents in these states – California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and New York – could legitimately answer that the government prohibits people from buying assault weapons. Among respondents living in states without laws restricting assault weapons, 68 percent correctly answered that the government does not prohibit people from buying assault
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weapons. But in states with laws restricting assault weapons, 68 percent answered that the government prohibits people from buying assault weapons. That identical percentages got the answer “right” according to their state laws prompts us to analyze the question with respect to federal law and then with respect to the state law in a respondent’s state of residence. Abortion is the third, though not least, of the three major hot button social issues. Abortion was made legal nationwide by the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade (1973), though some states had already legalized abortion. Court decisions in Webster v Reproductive Health Services (1989) and Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey (1990) allowed states to impose some restrictions on abortion such as prohibitions on state funding or use of state facilities, parental notification laws, waiting periods, and other statutes regulating abortion but without restricting the right of a women to have an abortion if she chooses. In the first wave of the panel survey conducted in April 2004, we asked respondents: “In the state you live in, would you say that abortion during the early months of pregnancy is currently: (1) by law never permitted, (2) permitted by law only in case of rape, incest, or when the woman’s life is in danger, (3) permitted by law for reasons other than rape, incest, or danger to the woman’s life, but only after the need for the abortion has been clearly established, (4) by law, always permitted as a matter of personal choice.” At the time of the survey, the correct answer to the question was (4). While states varied in regulations governing state funding and facilities, parental notification, and waiting
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periods, no state had laws as restrictive as (3) or any other response. Although several states restrict late term abortion, the question makes clear that the subject is early term abortion. Sixty-nine percent of respondents correctly answered that early term abortion is always permitted as a matter of personal choice in their states. On these significant issues of public policy, about two-thirds to three-quarters of the public knew the law. These percentages are in the same range as the proportion of the public that answered correctly questions about Social Security, Medicare, and other prominent domestic programs as reported in Delli-Carpini and Keeter (1996: Appendix 3). Whether these percentages represent an informed public or uninformed public is open to interpretation. From our perspective, these percentages are high and suggest that a public that does not know the name of the Vice President of the party with a majority of seats in Congress may still know quite a bit about political issues. But, from the perspective of legal theory, that one-quarter to one-third of the public was wrong about the law on three very high profile, widely publicized issues reveals some cracks in the doctrine that ignorance of the law is no excuse. Many people may not need to know about abortion, same sex marriage, and assault weapons since they may never confront these issues directly. But give the publicity the three receive, the percentages of Americans who do not know the law may signal even deeper ignorance about other issues of the law.
What Determines Knowledge of the Law? A few studies have examined public knowledge of issue that vary across states. The majority of studies on political knowledge at the state level focus on single issues,
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single states, or both. As such, past studies are not directly comparable to this study, as results may be issue specific, depending on the law. Various demographic variables show significant correlations with knowledge of state laws. A study on adolescent knowledge of healthcare laws in Minnesota showed that adolescents are not very knowledgeable, indicating a potential correlation with age (Loertscher & Simmons 2006). However, because the study has data only on adolescent knowledge and has no baseline comparison to other age groups, it is not possible to conclude that age is a significant factor. Another study shows that controlling for age, occupation and education level, women know more about family law than men (Saunders 1975). Unfortunately, there have been no studies on knowledge of same sex marriage law because it only recently emerged as a politically salient issue. A few studies address gun control law, though the majority of this research focuses on public opinion rather than political knowledge. In general, most people support gun control measures, such as mandatory waiting periods, mandatory background checks, and gun registration. People’s opinions are also stable over time, even when events such as Columbine are accounted for. In a study conducted in Virginia in 2001, a majority of respondents favored stricter gun control laws. When cross-analyzed with demographic factors and knowledge/familiarity of guns, knowledge/familiarity was significantly more explanatory of the perceived utility of gun control laws than any of the other factors, such as political ideology, age and gender (Wilson 2007). Similarly, another study analyzes the effect of political knowledge on issue framing, specific to guns. The study found that people with low political knowledge were more susceptible to issue framing, while people with high political knowledge showed stability in opinion
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(Haider-Markel & Joslyn 2001). A third study found that knowledge of previous state laws is not significantly correlated with public opinion on capital punishment, indicating that previous laws do not shape public opinion on current policies (Norrander 2000). There is a possibility of endogeneity within the model, since the direction of the link between public opinion and political knowledge on gun control laws, if any, is unclear.
Do People Know What They Know? In the quest for measuring the public’s levels of political information, political scientists and psychologists have not asked whether people know what they know. That is, do people who are knowledgeable about politics know they are knowledgeable? Do the uninformed know they are uninformed? Is possible for a person to know a lot of facts about politics but not a lot about issues? Are people more likely to overestimate or underestimate their knowledge of political issues? Measuring political knowledge may be as simple as asking people how much they know about an issue. If people are accurate in their self-assessments on specific issue, then a general measure of political information may be possible in one question by asking people how much they know about politics. On the other hand, people may overestimate their knowledge of politics, getting wrong what they think they have right and getting right what they may think they have wrong. When people are wrong about the law and public policy, is it because they assume the law is on their side or that it is against them? No work that we are aware of answers this interesting and important question. If people err on the side of thinking the law is against them, this may be a cause or consequence of the decline of trust in government. If
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people think the law or public policy agrees with them, then the decline of trust in government may not be as profound as widely alleged. Believing that the law is on one’s side may be a form of projection bias whereby people project their own opinions onto an institution or person, but only those about whom people have positive feelings. If citizens systematically believe the law is either for or against them, then measures of issue-specific policy information will be biased. We answer these three questions—what determines knowledge of the law, is there a better measure of political information, and do people believe the law is on their side or against them—using data from an innovative 2004 survey. Research Design and Data The 2004 Knowledge Network survey included three waves. The bulk of the survey contained questions that are tangential to this study, but at the end of each wave we included questions to tap political information. The first wave, in April, included the standard Delli-Carpini and Keeter battery of five questions (for abbreviation, the DC&K Five). The distribution of responses on the scale is typical for such surveys. The April wave and subsequent waves also include two sets of questions on which respondents rated the importance of and their knowledge of the issues tapped in the survey. The questions appeared in a grid on a computer screen, and respondents could click a bubble under one of the responses for each issue (see Appendix). The April wave included a question about the respondent’s opinion on early term abortion and the question shown earlier in which respondents were asked whether abortion is legal in the state in which they live. The September and November waves included questions about same sex marriage and the assault weapons ban. We asked the
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respondents’ their belief about the status quo on same sex marriage only in the November wave, while we asked about the assault weapons ban in both the September and November waves. The November wave also includes 203 fresh respondents who were not in the panel. These respondents are no different from the panel respondents in their opinions on abortion, same sex marriage, or the assault weapons ban, nor are they different in their knowledge of the status quo on the issues. In all surveys, the instruments to measure issue specific knowledge and issue importance appeared before any of the questions about the status quo on the issues in order to avoid the status quo questions influencing the self-assessments of knowledge. The survey also included instruments to measure respondent’s weekly newspaper reading, education level, ideology, partisanship, and probability of voting in the November election. In the analysis that follows, we scale the responses by either dividing them by two of their standard deviations (for newspaper reading and education levels), or by compressing them to scales with three points (for the Delli-Carpini & Keeter scale), to make their effects comparable to three point scale on which selfassessed knowledge and issue importance are measured. Partisanship and ideology are exceptions. We leave these on their standard seven point scales (ranging from -3 to 3, with conservative and Republican at higher values) and also fold the scales to capture partisan extremism and ideological extremism, both on four point scales. The dependent variables in our analysis are binary measures of whether a respond is correct about the law (1) or incorrect (0), for the 99 percent of respondents who answered the question about each law. Construction of the dependent variable is straightforward for abortion and federal gun laws. For same sex marriage and state gun
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laws, we coded respondents as correct if their answer match their state’s law on the issue. Due to the variation in laws across states, and more generally to the likely differences across respondents in unobserved traits across states, we estimate all models as multilevel models with varying intercepts (random effects) for respondent’s state of residence.
Results Table 1 presents the results for the four dependent variables. We estimate separate models for the assault weapons assuming a federal law and then the various state laws. With the exceptions of party identification and ideology, all of the variables are converted to the same scale where one unit represents half of the variable’s range, and the standard deviations of the variables are all approximately equal. Table 1 presents the legit coefficients. Figures 1 through 4 convert the logit coefficients to first differences on a probability scale: how much does the probability of a correct response increase due to a one unit change in each variable, holding all other variables constant? The bars represent the 95 percent confidence intervals. The models include four variables that take various perspectives on political sophistication of political knowledge: education, frequency of newspaper reading, selfreported knowledge on the specific issue, and a general measure of knowledge in the Delli-Carpini and Keeter scale. Issue importance is also in the model and captures motivation to become informed about an issue. The correlations among these five variables are surprisingly low, with the highest correlation of .43 between self-reported knowledge of gay marriage and self-reported knowledge of the sale of assault weapons.
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The lowest correlation of .10 appears between newspaper reading and knowledge of abortion. Collinearity among the variables is not a problem in estimation. Among the indicators of political information, self-assessed issue specific knowledge is the only one statistically significant across all four questions, and its substantive effect is the greatest among the knowledge items for all but federal law on the assault weapons ban. On average across the issues, a one-unit increase in self-reported knowledge (half of the scale) increases the probability of knowing the law by about .10. Based on the substantive and statistical significance and consistency of effect across issues of self-assessed knowledge, more survey researchers should simply ask respondents how much they know in general and on specific issues. The Delli-Carpini and Keeter scale does not generally perform as well as selfassessed knowledge on the issues. For same sex marriage and state gun laws, its predictive power is essentially zero. For abortion the scale performs as well as but no better than self-assessed knowledge. The only issue for which the DC&K Five is the best predictor is the assault weapons ban, assuming respondents are thinking about federal law. This difference between the DC&K Five and self-assessed knowledge on gun laws suggests something subtly important about the two scales. People who score highly on the DC&K scale have a great deal of knowledge about and perhaps even a focus on national politics since all five of the questions deal with national institutions and figures. They may naturally think the word ‘government’ in the question means federal. Respondents who rate themselves as knowledgeable on gun issues probably know more about the specifics of state laws that affect their daily live more directly—background checks, registration, hunting licenses—and thus think of the ‘government’ at the state
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level. Note that self-assessed knowledge is a valuable predictor of knowledge of gun laws regardless of whether we assume respondents are thinking about state or federal laws, whereas the DC&K scale predicts knowledge of the assault weapons ban only if we assume the federal law. Education and newspaper reading are not significant predictors of knowledge on any issue. On abortion, people who read the newspaper more frequently are more likely to be wrong about the legality of abortion. Issue importance is surprisingly insignificant as well. One might expect that people who rate an issue as important would be more knowledgeable about it, but the self-assessed knowledge item picks up much of that effect. On all issues, including guns, women are more likely to know the law than men. The effect of sex is statistically significant only for abortion but nearly so for same sex marriage. The Knowledge Networks questionnaire allowed respondents to skip questions, but “Don’t Know” responses on computer surveys are often lower than for telephone surveys. As Mondak and Anderson (2004) show, men are more likely than women to guess on knowledge questions, while women are less likely to respond. The computer mode of the survey may have erased this “guessing gap” to create a more accurate portrayal of the differences in knowledge between men and women. Surprisingly, likely voters are slightly less likely than non voters to know the law on these high profile, hot-button issues, though the effect is not quite statistically significant. On three for the four graphs, the effect for likely voters falls to the left of the vertical gray line, indicating that the variable reduces the probability of being correct.
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The results for partisanship show perhaps one of the causes of party polarization. The effects of these variables may appear small, but their scales are larger. To compare the results for Republican (PID 7-point scale) to the other variables, imagine shifting it three times its current distance from the gray line. Republicans are more likely than Democrats to be wrong about the law on gun control but to be right about abortion, and slightly more likely to be wrong about same sex marriage. Republicans are more likely to believe incorrectly that assault weapons have been banned, while Democrats are likely to believe incorrectly that abortion has been restricted. The effects for party extremism are less consistent. Strong Democrats and Strong Republicans are more likely than Independents to know the status of same sex marriage in their states. Ideological extremism does not show a significant effect in any model. Taken together, the results show that Democrats and Republicans misperceive the law in opposite directions, particularly by believing the law is against their party’s position on one of its primary electoral issues. Opinions on the specific issues, however, show that people tend to believe the law is on their side. It is easy to imagine that the opposite result would be true: people may have a tendency to believe the law is against them. The data do not support such a hypothesis. Instead, opinions on the issues are, along with self-assessed knowledge, the best predictors of knowledge of the law. People who oppose same sex marriage are more likely than proponents to know the laws of their state. Since the vast majority of states did not allow same sex marriage, opponents of same sex marriage know the law in part because they agree with it. The same pattern appears on abortion. Pro-choice respondents are much more likely to be correct that abortion is legal. Pro-life
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respondents are more likely than pro-choice respondents to believe that abortion is illegal. On both state and federal assault weapons bans, opponents of the bans are not more likely to be correct. The models in general perform well in explaining who knows and who does not know the law, though much variance remains unexplained. Surely many people guessed and sometimes ended up with the right answer. However, several systematic predictors of knowledge appear in the results. The most important of these are a person’s opinion on an issue and their self-assessed knowledge about it.
Conclusions This study demonstrates three things about knowledge of the law. First, general political knowledge is not a good predictor of whether people know the law on specific issues. Political knowledge is multidimensional. Most of our survey instruments for measuring knowledge focus too heavily on the names of political figures and the functioning of institutions. We know very little about whether people are informed about the law and key policy issues. Second, asking survey respondents how much they know about a specific issue is a more accurate method to gauge knowledge than a few general questions about politics. It is surprising that simply asking people how much they know about an issue is such a strong predictor of their actual knowledge on the issue. People know what they know. We see little evidence that people systematically overestimate or misestimate their knowledge. This useful fact may allow survey researchers to dispense with lengthy questions designed to gauge political knowledge. We see no reason why asking people
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how much they know about politics could not supplement or replace the Delli-Carpini & Keeter Five in most surveys. Asking people factual questions about specific policy issues may not be as accurate as asking them how much they think they know. Projection bias may explain why people believe the law agrees with them. Projection occurs when a person believes that someone or something that they feel positively toward shares their opinions. A long history of research shows that people place the candidates they like for personal reasons closer to their own position on issues (Page and Brody 1972). Studies of issue voting have to account for the possibility of projection bias by avoiding using the voters’ own placements of the candidates on issues as an accurate gauge of issue voting. The same may be true about measures of issue specific information. People may project their own opinions onto the law, leading us to believe that more people know the law than actually do. Third, the large substantive effect of one’s own opinion on knowing the law raises several issues for debates about trust in government and for theories of the law. Projection bias occurs when a person feels positively toward on object. If people project their own opinions onto their state and federal governments, then they must feel positively toward the government. It is perhaps comforting to find that Americans do not believe the government is against them on hot-button social issues, though the tendency of partisans to error on the side of believing the law is against them may be a source of party polarization. Many Americans do not know the law on some very basic, widely publicized, and hotly debated issues. If a third of Americans do not know the legality of abortion, same
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sex marriage, or purchasing an assault rifle, then what else do they not know? Perhaps worse, people tend to believe the law reflects their own opinions. Many people do not know the law, but they believe it agrees with them.
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Appendix: Self-Assessed Knowledge and Issue Importance Questions, 2004 Knowledge Networks Survey
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25
Table 1: Self-Assessed Knowledge Explains Correct Responses on All Issues
Predictor
(Intercept)
Opinion
on
Issue
Delli‐Carpini
&
Keeter
Scale
Self‐assessed
Knowledge
Importance
of
Issues
Read
Newspaper
Education
Female
Likely
Voter
Party
ID
Party
Extremism
Ideology
Ideological
Extremism
N
Same
Sex
Marriage
.18
(.47)
.35**
(.14)
.03
(.21)
.37**
(.18)
.02
(.14)
.29
(.20)
.11
(.22)
.31
(.20)
‐.12
(.14)
‐.03
(.06)
.20**
(.10)
‐.05
(.07)
‐.05
(.09)
680
Assault
Weapons
(Federal)
‐.53
(.37)
‐.13
(.20)
.60**
(.15)
.39**
(.13)
.12
(.13)
.12
(.16)
.16
(.17)
.22
(.16)
‐.07
(.11)
‐.08**
(.04)
‐.10
(.08)
‐.08
(.06)
.06
(.07)
906
Assault
Weapons
(State)
.09
(.38)
.12
(.20)
‐.05
(.15)
.34**
(.12)
‐.02
(.13)
.11
(.15)
.03
(.16)
.22
(.15)
.00
(.11)
‐.03
(.04)
.07
(.07)
‐.03
(.05)
‐.03
(.05)
906
Abortion
‐1.01
(.30)
1.46**
(.20)
.41**
(.13)
.44**
(.11)
.09
(.11)
‐.35**
(.14)
.13
(.15)
.29**
(.14)
‐.13
(.09)
.07
(.04)
.08
(.07)
‐.05
(.05)
‐0.03
(.06)
1190
Source: 2004 Knowledge Networks survey. Entries are maximum likelihood (logit) coefficients with standard errors in parentheses. ** indicates p
