Political Ignorance Research Articles

“Mistresses of Their Own Destiny”: Group Rights, Gender, and Realistic Rights of Exit

Many recent arguments for rights or exemptions for religious or other cultural groups that may not themselves be liberal are based on liberal premises—whether the central liberal value be individual autonomy or tolerance for diversity of ways of life. Any consistent defense of group rights or exemptions that is based on liberal premises has to ensure that at least one individual right—the right to exit one’s group of origin—trumps any group right. What this entails will be explored later, but for several reasons, the claim itself seems prima facie incontrovert-

Political Ignorance and Collective Policy Preferences

In contrast with the expectations of many analysts, I find that raw policy-specific facts, such as the direction of change in the crime rate or the amount of the federal budget devoted to foreign aid, have a significant influence on the public’s political judgments. Using both traditional survey methods and survey-based randomized experiments, I show that ignorance of policy-specific information leads many Americans to hold political views different from those they would hold otherwise. I also show that the effect of policy-specific information is not adequately captured by the measures of general political knowledge used in previous research. Finally, I show that the effect of policy-specific ignorance is greatest for Americans with the highest levels of political knowledge. Rather than serve to dilute the influence of new information, general knowledge (and the cognitive capacities it reflects) appears to facilitate the incorporation of new policy-specific information into political judgments.

Fieldwork in Indian Religion: Some Notes On Experience and Ethics

Field research in India is always a challenge, especially the investiga tion of religious experience, which has been my area of research. Questions about integrity are relevant ones in the study of religious experience, and more generally the question of integrity is important to explore. What does it mean to it right? For instance, I have had informants share experiences that they have never discussed be fore, and that they value highly. For some, these experiences were the defining moments in their lives, the most cherished and precious moments. How, then, do we treat the experiences of others with integrity? There are many levels to respect, and many ways that data can be misused. A colleague in anthropology told me of the distress of his own advisor, whose work on the hill tribes of Cambodia was used by the U.S. government as a map for bombing during the expansion of the Vietnam War. Here is a gross case of misuse of data, where research led to destruction in the informant's culture. However, in formants can be treated badly in other, more subtle ways. For me, integrity means honoring the religious views of my in formants, not belittling them to their faces (as missionaries and Com munists have done) or behind their backs (like academics who reduce their experiences to economic or political ignorance, pathology or sexual repression). People can be belittled in many ways—they used to be ignorant or benighted and pre-logical savages, now they are puppets of governments or slaves of hegemonic ideas, or hypocritical seekers of power. I respect the religious experiences of my informants by not analyzing and contextualizing them out of existence—which is not a popular position in a field with a liking for sociological models. I consider such reductionism a violation of my informants' trust.

Are There Typical Age Curves in Political Behavior? The “Age Invariance” Hypothesis and Political Socialization

The acquisition and expression of political orientations are highly age‐related; however, the nature of age‐typical forms is rarely conceptualized in socialization research. The first part of this article examines the hypothesized nature of “age invariance” identified by criminologists in the study of deviant behavior and the inverted U‐curve of voting behavior identified by political scientists. The second part uses survey data from German youth and young adults (n = 7,280, ages 13 to 30) to describe typical age patterns for various types of unconventional behavior. The more unconventional the behavior, the more the curve resembles what criminologists have long found for deviant behavior. Youth approval of the more disruptive forms of political behavior has a left‐skewed age distribution that is also typical of deviant behavior. This suggests an unappealing combination of potential actionism and political ignorance occurring in late adolescence, a possibility that ought to be of consequence for the design of civic education and other interventions. From a research perspective, these age‐typical patterns can be useful as a theory‐building and theory‐testing strategy by treating them as baselines against which individual and cultural variations can be measured.

TAXES, TORTS, AND THE TOXICS RELEASE INVENTORY: CONGRESSIONAL VOTING ON INSTRUMENTS TO CONTROL POLLUTION

Theories of rational political ignorance and congressional voting imply that Congress members may take different interests into account when they vote on technical amendments than when they vote on a bill's final passage. This article uses votes on Superfund reauthorization to examine what factors influence politicians' support for different instruments to control pollution and how the interests Congress members take into account vary with the anticipated degree of electoral scrutiny. Controlling for a legislator's general support for environmental programs, a representative's votes on specific policy instruments in Superfund legislation depended on the district‐level costs and benefits of the instruments.

Karl Popper, 1902–1994: Radical fallibilism, political theory, and democracy

Abstract Popper's philosophy of science represents a radical departure from almost all other views about knowledge. This helps account for serious misunderstandings of it among admirers no less than among adversaries. The view that knowledge has and needs no foundations is counterintuitive and apparently relativistic. But Popper's fallibilism is in fact a far cry from anti‐realism. Similarly, Popper's social and political philosophy, although seemingly conservative in practice, can be quite radical in theory. And while Popper was an ardent democrat, his reasons for supporting democracy were so unusual that they may escape the problem posed for democratic theory by the political ignorance of the demos.

Comparing Americans' Political Information in 1988 and 1992

Although Americans were more active in the 1992 campaign and felt they were better informed than they had been in 1988, National Election Studies (NES) data from both years show that Americans were not substantially more knowledgeable. Two-stage-least-squares equations estimated on the 1988 and 1992 NES show that the processes of becoming informed were the same in both years. These analyses show, once again, the intractability of political ignorance in mass publics.

Teaching American Government

Teachers of the introductory course in American Government and Politics have pondered the question of what to teach for many years. Today the problem is becoming more complex as increasing numbers of students enter college, in the words of the Times Mirror survey, knowing less and caring less about politics than any other previous generation.' The new political ignorance and apathy, something most of us see in our classrooms every day, comes when the United States is losing its position as the globe's dominant economic power. Changing global economic conditions make it clear that this nation cannot afford to ignore changing political and economic realities. 2

"Righting" Today's Art History

Previous articleNext article No Access"Righting" Today's Art HistoryStephen PolcariStephen Polcari Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by American Art Volume 5, Number 1/2Winter - Spring 1991 Sponsored by the Smithsonian American Art Museum Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/424102 Views: 12Total views on this site Copyright 1991 Oxford University PressPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Expertise and Political Psychology

Expertise and Political Psychology

Determinants of Leftist Radical Belief in the United States: A Test of Competing Theories

The endorsement of leftist radical proposals among members of the mass public has been variously attributed to: political ignorance, social isolation, social integration, economic insecurity, objective economic hardship, and subjective deprivation. This study employs national survey data to simultaneously evaluate each of these competing theories. The political ignorance and social isolation theories receive no empirical support, while the evidence yields varying degrees of support for the other explanations. The findings bear on debates concerning 'American exceptionalism and the responsiveness of the two party system, as well as longstanding theoretical debates concerning the determinants of leftist radicalism.

Political Knowledge and Political Ignorance: a re‐examination

Political Knowledge and Political Ignorance: a re‐examination

Het publiek in de tribune : vormen van politieke informatie

This contribution should be seen as an attempt to retrieve information from restcategories, such as «does not know» and «no answer». From these, and from other data as well, we constructed 10, mostly summating, indexes of political ignorance. Among them is an index of objective ignorance, that is about political events, persons and situations. The others aim at more subjective dimensions. Does the respondent feel informed about the political process : about government and party performance, partisan congeniality, modalities of voting, local politics social problems, political issues ?There seems to be some evidence in favor of the following hypotheses.1. The indexes tend to compensate each other: respondents who score low on one index, do not necessarily score low on the next one.2. I t is difficult to ascertain the validity of an index of objective ignorance. Moreover it does by no means express all the (relevant) dimensions of political information.3. A mong indexes of subjective ignorance one should distinguish between «policy» and «political» information ; the latter seems to refer to a situation where strictly political rules of the game, a.o. those of political conflict, prevail.4. Of all indexes the «political issues» index showed the most discriminating power, as well as the most expected associations.

Is There No European Opinion?

The public's lack of information and dearth of opinion on political and economic matters, well known to pollsters in the United States, are also common in Europe. Nearly fifty polls and surveys conducted in various European countries between 1948 and 1958 are summarized, most of them dealing with supra-national bodies such as the Council of Europe and the European Common Market. The principle of European unification had strong public support, but there was wide-spread public ignorance of specific institutions, as well as ignorance of internal politics; on the average, 40% to 50% of those polled would express no opinion on the desirability of a given supra-national institution.

Political Ignorance in New York State and the Polls

Political Ignorance in New York State and the Polls