The Rise of the Misinformed: Political Knowledge Items in a Post-Truth Era

Much of the past research on political knowledge has been motivated by the strong link between voter competence and political engagement and interest. People who are more informed are also more likely to be more interested in and engaged with politics. These conclusions have been drawn by comparing the ones who give the correct answer(s) to respondents who either gave the wrong answer or opted for the Don’t Know (DK) category. Yet, past research offers little insight to how different are the individuals who answered wrongly from the ones who knew the right answer. While past scholarship has paid considerable attention to finding the “hidden knowledge” (if any) behind the Don’t Know (DK) answers, wrong answers have received less consideration. This is mostly due to the underlying assumption, particularly in close-ended questions, that those who give the wrong answer can be considered as uninformed. We argue that this assumption has become a risky belief at the age of “fake news” or plain misinformation in the political debate. The purpose of this paper is, therefore, to recognise the role of misinformation by testing the differences between “right” and “wrong” knowledge in relation to political engagement and interest. Using data from the American National Election Study and the British Election Study, we model both issues by constructing indicators that distinguish the informed from the misinformed respondents. We theorise that what links political knowledge to political engagement is not only the possession of information, but also the perception of being informed. Our results show that the analysis of political knowledge cannot ignore the role of false information. People who report wrong answers – i.e. the misinformed – are more similar to those who are correctly informed with regards to their political behaviour and attitudes than those who admit to simply not knowing.