How Does the Gender-Of-Interviewer Affect the Levels of Political Knowledge?

Political knowledge is a key concept for the explanation of several political phenomena such as the individuals’ voting behavior, as it enforces attitude formation and mediates the interplay of (mass media) information and personal predispositions (e.g., Delli Carpini and Keeter, 1996; Zaller, 1992). In addition, it is crucial for effective democratic participation of citizens (e.g., Delli Carpini and Keeter, 1996; Lau and Redlawsk, 2006). In most election studies, political knowledge is measured by a battery of questions enquiring about citizens’ factual political knowledge. These batteries often refer to various subdomains such as citizens’ knowledge of institutions and political processes, public figures or political parties. While the dimensionality (i.e., whether or not political knowledge is a multidimensional concept), suitable question formats (e.g., closed- or open-ended), or the inclusion of “don’t know”-answers are often discussed by scholars, interviewer effects on political knowledge are hardly addressed. This is surprising because research on interviewer effects in different contexts indicates that interviewers can substantially affect the respondents’ response behavior (e.g. Beullens and Loosveldt, 2016). For example, interviewer characteristics such as gender or race have been shown to influence how respondents answer to questions on gender-related issues (Flores-Macias and Lawson, 2008). Such effects were found for various different modes of data collection, but are usually stronger for personal interviews (CAPI). A first study on interviewer effects on responses to knowledge questions (Dawson and Silver, 2003) identifies a race-of-interviewer effect, i.e. African American respondents tend to give the correct answer more frequently when they were interviewed by an interviewer of the same race, even when controlling for respondents’ level of education and gender. Our paper aims at closing the research gap on interviewer effects on responses on knowledge questions. We analyze the effects of interviewer characteristics, especially age, education, and gender, on respondents specific political knowledge. We differentiate between three subdomains of political knowledge: knowledge of (1) political actors, (2) the political system, and (3) party positions. We employ two different kinds of knowledge measures: (a) the amount of correct answers (correct answers are scored 1 and all other answers are coded as 0) and (b) the expression of valid answers (responses, independently whether correct or not, are coded as 1 and “don’t know” responses coded as 0). Such a procedure allows us not only to investigate whether interviewer characteristics have an effect on the number of correct answers, but also to determine whether they affect the tendency to provide a substantial answer to knowledge questions. We rely on data collected in CAPI by the Austrian National Election Study (AUTNES) as well as the German Longitudinal Election Study (GLES). We show that interviewers’ level of education and gender affect respondents’ specific political knowledge in both countries