The Political Environment and Citizen Competence

Abstract

care reform, we find that performance depends heavily on environmental conditions. A combination of general information with increased motivation to act responsibly improves aggregate performance. An extremely favorable environment not only enhances performance, but it even eliminates the effects of individual differences in education and political sophistication. The analysis points toward reforming structures that shape the political environment as the most plausible route to improved democratic governance. rom the late 1950s to the mid-1980s, the study of citizen decision making focused almost exclusively on the individual citizen's cognitive capabilities and political knowledge. With few exceptions, this research reached the familiar verdict that most citizens know little about politics, do not care to know much about it, and often make ill-considered and superficial judgments (Converse 1964;Sniderman 1993). An important corollary was that the well educated and politically sophisticated-the cognitively engaged, to use Zaller's (1992) term-outperform other citizens on judgment tasks (see Luskin 1987 for an excellent review). More recently, some scholars have argued that the political environment serves as an informational crutch that assists citizens when they are making political judgments (Lupia 2000). The optimistic outlook of the political-heuristics literature, in particular, rests on the view that the environment gives people simple judgment tasks to perform and generally provides reliable cues to help citizens perform them (Carmines and Kuklinski 1990; Lupia 1994; Lupia and McCubbins 1998; Mondak 1993; Popkin 1991; Sniderman 2000; Sniderman, Brody, and Tetlock 1991; Wittman 1995). From this perspective, the cognitively highly engaged still outperform the less engaged, but even the latter usually make reasonable choices. Critics contend that the environment of contemporary American politics provides considerably less assistance than champions of heuristics have portrayed (see Bartels 1996; Kuklinski and Quirk 2000; and Luskin 2000 for critiques). Nevertheless, the idea that political environments might enhance citizen performance is an important advance in public opinion research.