Journal of Electoral Studies

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The Measurement of Political Knowledge

Shiow-Duan Hawang, Yuan-Ming Hsu, and Chiung-Chu Lin
2014 / 05
Volume 21, No.1

pp.89-126
10.6612/tjes.2014.21.01.89-126
Paper

Abstract

This paper aims to examine the measurement of political knowledge and its consequences via different formats of question designs. Would using different formats of questions, elicit different response behaviours from the respondents? We argue that different types of questions affect the reliability and validity of the concept. The data used in this paper was collected by the Taiwan's Election and Democratization Study (TEDS) which was designed to study electoral behaviour in the 2012 presidential and legislative election. Another data was collected by an experimental design survey carried out on students of Soochow University. Based on the preliminary analysis from the TEDS data, open-ended formats of political knowledge exert more influence in explaining electoral participation than closed-ended. The results from the experimental design survey further shows that closed-ended questions provide the respondents with opportunity to ＂guess＂ the answers, thus respondents turn out to have a higher score of political knowledge. This shows that different formats of questions truly affect the validity and reliability of the concept of political knowledge. This issue also plays a role in showing how political knowledge serves as an independent variable in explaining political attitudes and behaviour. Whether a higher score is due to the respondents' ＂true＂ knowledge or the chance to guess, however, needs further data to explore in the near future.

Keywords

political knowledge

open-ended question

closed-ended question

experimental design