David Bernstein reprints a list of average scores for political knowledge vs. strength of party identification. (He uses Republicans as a surrogate for political conservatives.) Following is a slight rearrangement of the data:
| Strength | Republican | Democrats |
| Strong | 18.7 | 15.4 |
| "Independent" | 15.7 | 14.2 |
| Weak | 14.1 | 13.3 |
| Independent / no party affiliation | 9.5 | |
(I hope this renders better when published than it does in "preview" mode.) (Yay! It does! I don't have to go in and play with the template.)
Note the political knowledge score increases with strength of party identification from 9.5 for the completely unaffiliated to 18.7 for strongly affiliated Republicans. Note also that for all populations with a declared party preference, Republicans outscore Democrats at each level of strength of affiliation.
I haven't explored the error inherent in these scores, so I can't say how significant they are, but the notion that conservatives are less well informed than liberals is not well supported.
No comments:
Post a Comment