What if Any Small Extra is a Major Change in Opportunity? Political Knowledge in a Low Information Quality Environment

The opportunity to encounter quality, unbiased comprehensible information has been shown to matter both for levels of political knowledge and for knowledge based inequalities. In our paper we try to show how opportunity is a particularly crucial determinant of the level of and differences in political knowledge of citizens in a low information quality environment with no non-partisan source of news and low accuracy and argument quality even in 'high-brow' media outlets. Romania in 2012-2013 is a context with such characteristics. Furthermore, it is also a country where people report one of the lowest frequency of political discussion with their peers in Europe. Our analysis focuses citizens' reactions to a recent deliberative event on the highly controversial issue of shale gas extraction/fracking where factual and argument based information was provided and they had the possibility to interact with peers, experts and party representatives For characterizing the "usual" opportunity structure, we use data on media information characteristics (2nd wave of www.mediasystemsineurope.org) and content analysis of media coverage of fracking. We use the complex panel structure of the 2012 Romanian Election Study to see the determinants of political knowledge and knowledge inequalities in Romania, including inter-personal discussion and media exposure. The deliberative event included a randomly selected group of people from Bucharest who listened to experts and politicians presenting arguments on the issue and asked questions. Half of the sample participated in discussion groups with fellow citizens, where the main task was laying out pros and cons of shale gas extraction and agreeing on ranking their importance. Preliminary results indicate significant differences in participants’ evaluation of their level of information on the debated issue before and after the event and a significant increase in factual knowledge on the topic as well as a reduction to half of the percentage of undecided/DK.