Three Aspects of Political Sophistication - Which one can be blamed for Generating Bias?

The influential book of Achen and Bartels (2016) further reinforces existing concerns in the literature about the link between voters’ political sophistication and partisan bias in their political evaluations. The proposed paper differentiates between three important aspects of political sophistication, investigating the effect of 1) education, 2) the interest in politics and 3) the time spent on gaining political information. Using data from the European Social Survey it identifies political groups based on voters’ winner-loser positions, and it investigates the extent of bias in the political evaluations of these two groups. The main question of the paper is whether partisan bias in political evaluations is inherently connected either to political interest, informedness or levels of education. The results show that while being more interested in politics is clearly connected to having more biased political evaluations, the level of education and the time spent on gaining political information are not clearly related to more biased views. While there is a positive correlation between the level of bias and all the three analysed variables, controlling for political interest, the effect of the level of education on bias is actually negative. Furthermore, aggregating data to the country-level, we find a reversed relationship between the extent of bias and the three analysed aspects of political sophistication. Namely, citizens of countries with higher levels of education, informedness and political interest are less biased in their political evaluations on an average. Therefore, results are mixed, but compared to existing results they offer some room for optimism.