Which Religious Traditions Are The Most Politically Knowledgeable?
(ANALYSIS) Your first year in graduate school is like trying to drink from a firehose. It’s just so much information coming at you at one time that it’s impossible for even 10% of it to actually soak in.
I’ve gone back and read a few of the assigned texts in my first year of graduate school later on, and I realized just how much I missed the first time around.
There are a couple of books that have stuck around in my memory, even twenty years later: “Nature and Origin of Mass Opinion” by Zaller and the “Semi-Sovereign People” by Schattschneider. I still reference both on a regular basis.
Another that is always top of mind has a pretty descriptive title, “What Americans Know about Politics and Why It Matters.” It’s by Michael X. Delli Carpini and Scott Keeter, and it’s the most exhaustive look at political knowledge that we have in the United States.
What they found was pretty simple and incredibly depressing: Only about 30% of Americans can correctly answer basic questions about government institutions, public policy, etc. In other words, it’s a miracle that democracy works at all given just how little the average voter knows.
That’s a finding that always lives in the back of my head when I look at survey questions that require even a modicum of background knowledge. It’s inadvisable to assume that voters have a baseline of knowledge about anything.
The Cooperative Election Study has been asking a short political knowledge battery for a while now. I just want to focus on two specific questions: Can respondents correctly identify which party controlled a majority in the House of Representatives and the Senate when they were asked? For instance, this poll was fielded in October of 2023, when the Republicans held a majority in the House but the Senate was in the hands of the Democrats.
A slim majority of folks knew that the House was being led by the Republicans, 52%. The share who knew the Senate belonged to the GOP was slightly higher, at 56%. But, to me, the real measure of political knowledge is just answering both those questions correctly.
In this sample, that was 43% of folks. That’s a bit higher than the work by Delli Carpini and Keeter, but they had a five question battery. I am keeping it as simple as possible for this and just sticking with two questions.
Before I pivot to religion variables, let me just give you the lay of the land on two key factors that can have an impact on political knowledge: partisanship and education.
It should come as little surprise that education is positively related to political knowledge. You can see that very distinct stair-step pattern in this graph.
For those who stopped at high school, just 34% got both questions correct. For those who earned a bachelor’s degree, it was 53%, and then those with at least a master’s degree did 10 points better than that. The most educated are the most politically savvy.
To read the rest of Ryan Burge’s column, please visit his Substack page.
Ryan Burge is an assistant professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, a pastor in the American Baptist Church and the co-founder and frequent contributor to Religion in Public, a forum for scholars of religion and politics to make their work accessible to a more general audience. His research focuses on the intersection of religiosity and political behavior, especially in the U.S. Follow him on X at @ryanburge.