The Fact of Experience: Rethinking Political Knowledge and Civic Competence

Articles

"The information-based model of politics implies that there are right answers to most political questions, if only one were adequately informed."¹

A decade ago, in her path-breaking book, Diana Mutz drew our attention to fundamental tradeoffs in our conceptions of good citizenship. Through a review of existing work and her own analyses, she argued that on the one hand intense partisanship can be a good thing. A distinctive political perspective can motivate people to participate. But on the other hand, she stressed, devout partisanship can blind people to the validity of alternative views and cause biases in the way information is received and processed.

Mutz called into question the fixation on "right" answers in politics. If people disagree, does it necessarily mean that one of them is wrong? In our divisive, polarized, highly contentious political present, we should question whether the central task of good citizenship is arriving at the right answer with the right information. Instead, it would seem the central political task in these times is the ability to govern each other with compassion, justice, and equity--to understand where each other is coming from even if we disagree.

Nevertheless, many scholars continue to emphasize the importance of right and rational thinking and are troubled by citizens' limited knowledge of consequential political facts. It is a near consensus that members of the United States public know little about politics²--and that this is a problem.³Scholars fear that without sufficient political information, people cannot understand the relevance of political debates to their lives nor which policies advance their interests. It can also lead people to make choices based on falsehoods and misinformation as Jennifer Hochschild and Katherine Levine Einstein argue in their recent book Do Facts Matter?⁴Differences in the distribution of political knowledge have been shown to be large enough to affect election outcomes⁵and apparent majority preferences on matters of public policy.⁶

These are legitimate concerns, but like Mutz, we question whether an Information-Based Model of Civic Competence is the most relevant model for our information-saturated political environment. This model depends on two major assumptions, which are subject to considerable debate:

1.. There exists some finite set of political facts that good citizens should be...