Institutional Context and Reduction of the Resource Bias in Political Sophistication

Abstract

I argue that institutional context conditions the effect of socioeconomic resources on individuals' levels of political sophistication. Specifically, because the decision to become sophisticated is quite expensive for citizens at the lower end of the SES scale, the relatively high levels of free information produced in certain party and electoral system contexts leads disproportionately large numbers of these citizens-as compared to those with more resources-to decide to become politically sophisticated. I formulate and test (using OLS regression) a conditional model of political sophistication that includes institutional context variables, a “resources” factor score, and interaction terms representing the product of “resources” and each of these context variables. The model is supported empirically. The interaction term coefficients have signs that are the reverse of those for the context variables, indicating that the effect of resources on sophistication is greater or smaller depending on the value of the institutional variables. This conditional effect is graphically depicted.