On the Varieties and Utilities of Political Expertise

Abstract

A catalog of the various political expertise and schema measures in use reveals little consensus among researchers and little basis for comparison across research programs. To examine the varieties of political expertise and their utilities in political information processing, virtually the entire battery of the available measures was given to a sample of Pittsburgh voters, who then read newspaper articles on political issues of current local interest. Confirmatory factor analysis of the expertise measures indicated a cluster of political knowledge, operationalized as (a) accurate consensual knowledge about liberals' and conservatives' issue stands, plus various individuals' and groups' ideological stands, (b) the issue stands of the president and one group, and (c) facts about the government. Other coherent dimensions of political expertise included political activity, print media use, electronic media use, and political self-schema. Structural equations supported political knowledge and print media usage as linked to rapid reading and accurate recall of representative political information, even when education was controlled.