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Robert C. Luskin University of Texas at Austin Government Government 381S Robert C. Luskin Spring, 2019 University of Texas at Austin Unique number: Monday, 6:30-9:30, BAT 15.102 38470 Office: BAT 3.148 Email: [email protected] Phone: 650-380-0430 Office Hours: M 3:00-4:00, T 2:30-3:30, W 3:00-4:00, & by appointment Political Sophistication This course is about cognitive engagement in politics—a dimension on which people vary enormously, from those who are walking New Republics or National Reviews or Guardians or Figaros to those who don't know who the President or Prime Minister is. (There are some.) And this variation matters, in ways we shall explore. Perhaps the broadest variable under this heading is political sophistication (a.k.a. aware- ness, cognitive complexity, or expertise): a matter of both the quantity and the organization of political cognition (regardless of accuracy). Closely related variables include political infor- mation (a matter simply of quantity, regardless of organization or accuracy), knowledge (the quantity of accurate cognition), and misinformation (the quantity of inaccurate cognition). We consider this whole family of variables: how best to measure them, who has how much of them and why, and to what extent and how they flavor political attitudes and behaviors. Many of the readings and much of the discussion will focus on these variables’ effects—on the recognition and efficient pursuit of one's interests; policy and electoral preferences; attitude ex- tremity; persuadability and the kinds of appeals most likely to persuade; political tolerance; the extent and direction of political participation; the weights given to candidate versus policy con- siderations in voting; etc. Deliberation, in the conventional sense of serious, open-minded discussion, is also re- lated, since many of its effects operate through sophistication. Thus we shall also read about and discuss the Deliberative Polling project, which can be viewed as a quasi-experiment gauging po- litical sophistication’s effects on policy and electoral preferences. While many of the best data and much of the best work are on the U.S., it should be clear that these variables are at play, and their consequences felt, in every democratic polity. The course thus straddles American and Comparative Politics (and is listed in both fields). It also draws a great deal from psychology, relevant to both. Prerequisites There are no specific prerequisites. It is not important to have taken the core or any other previous course in Political Behavior, Comparative Politics, or American politics, nor to have taken graduate statistics courses (although I do encourage you to do so). First-year students are 2 specifically welcome, and have usually done well. Format This is a research seminar, calling on you to discuss the assigned readings and to research and write a substantial paper (consulting as much as necessary with me individually in the pro- cess). My hope is that many will in due course be expandable into publishable articles or disser- tation chapters. Readings We shall read all or most of the following books, along with a good many articles, listed below. Achen, Christopher H. and Larry M. Bartels. 2016. Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hochschild, Jennifer L. and Katherine Levine Einstein. 2015. Do Facts Matter?: Information and Misinformation in American Politics. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press. Kahneman, Daniel. 2011. Thinking, Fast and Slow. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux. Kinder, Donald R. and Nathan P. Kalmoe. 2017. Neither Liberal nor Conservative: Ideological Innocence in the American Public. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Lodge, Milton and Charles S. Taber. 2013. The Rationalizing Voter. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. McIntyre, Lee. 2018. Post-Truth. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Sophia Rosenfeld, Sophia. 2018. Democracy and Truth: A Short History. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Settle, Jaime E. 2018. Frenemies: How Social Media Polarizes America. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Outline I Organizational (January 28) II Meet the Family: Varieties of Political Belief A. What Are We Talking about? Definition, Measurement, Distribution (February 4) Converse, Philip E. 1964. The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics. In David Apter (ed.). 3 Ideology and Discontent. New York: Basic Books. Luskin, Robert C. 1987. Measuring Political Sophistication. American Journal of Political Sci- ence 31: 856-99. Converse, Philip E. 2000. Assessing the Capacity of Mass Electorates. Annual Review of Polit- ical Science 3: 331-53. Barabas, Jason, Jennifer Jerit, William Pollock, and Carlisle Rainey. 2014. The Question(s) of Political Knowledge. American Political Science Review, 108 (4): 840-855. Dutant, Julien. 2015. The Legend of the Justified True Belief Analysis. Philosophical Perspec- tives, 29 (1): 95-145. Luskin, Robert C., Gaurav Sood, James S. Fishkin, and Kyu S. Hahn. Deliberative Distortions? Homogenization, Polarization, and Domination. Revised and resubmitted to the British Journal of Political Science. Lee, Seonghui and Akitaka Matsuo. 2018. Decomposing political knowledge: what is confi- dence in knowledge and why it matters. Electoral Studies, 51: 1-13. Vegetti, Federico, Zoltán Fazekas, and Zsombor Zoltán Méder. Sorting your way out: Perceived party positions, political knowledge, and polarization. Acta Politica, 52 (4): 479–501. Hochschild and Einstein, chs. 1-2. B. How Much or Little Do People Know? (February 11) Mondak, Jeffery J., and Belinda Creel Davis. 2001. “Asked and Answered: Knowledge Levels When We Will Not Take ‘Don't Know’ for an Answer.” Political Behavior 23:199-224. Gibson, James L. and Gregory A. Caldeira. 2009. Knowing the Supreme Court? A Reconsider- ation of Public Ignorance of the High Court. Journal of Politics, 71 (2): 429–441. Prior, Markus and Arthur Lupia. 2008. Money, Time, and Political Knowledge: Distinguishing Quick Recall and Political Learning Skills. American Journal of Political Science, 52 (1): 169– 183. Prior, Markus. 2014. Visual Political Knowledge: A Different Road to Competence? Journal of Politics, 76 (1) 41 – 57. Ksiazkiewicz, Aleksander. 2013. Implicit Political Knowledge. PS-Political Science & Politics 46 (3): 553-555. Luskin, Robert C. and John G. Bullock. “‘Don’t Know’ Means ‘Don’t Know’: DK Responses and the Public’s Level of Political Knowledge.” Journal of Politics, 73 (2011): 547–557. Sturgis, Patrick and Patten Smith. 2009. "Fictitious Issues Revisited: Political Interest, 4 Knowledge and the Generation of Nonattitudes." Political Studies, . Kuha, Jouni, Sarah Butt, Myrsini Katsikatsou, and Chris J. Skinner. 2018. The Effect of Probing "Don't Know" Responses on Measurement Quality and Nonresponse in Surveys. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 113 (521): 26-40. DeBell, Matthew. 2013. Harder Than It Looks: Coding Political Knowledge on the ANES. Po- litical Analysis 21: 393–406 Paulhus, Delroy L., P.D. Harms, M. Nadine Bruce, and Daria C. Lysy. 2003. The Over-Claim- ing Technique: Measuring Self-Enhancement Independent of Ability. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 84: 890-904. Clifford, Scott and Jennifer Jerit. 2016. Cheating on Political Knowledge Questions in Online Surveys: An Assessment of the Problem and Solutions. Public Opinion Quarterly, 80 (4) 858– 887. Luskin, Robert C., Bruno Cautrés, Sherry Lowrance, and Dabniel Weitzel. 2018. Political Knowledge in France. Manuscript, University of Texas at Austin. Luskin, Robert C., Gaurav Sood, and Daniel Weitzel. 2018. Hidden Knowledge, Veiled Igno- rance: Do People Know More—or Even Less—about Politics than Commonly Thought? Manu- script, University of Texas at Austin. C. Misinformation (February 18) Kull, S., Ramsay, C., and E. Lewis. 2003. Misperceptions, the media, and the Iraq war. Political Science Quarterly, 118 (4): 569-598. Nyhan, Brendan and Jason Reifler. 2010. When Corrections Fail: The Persistence of Political Misperceptions. Political Behavior, 32: 303–330. Lewandowsky, Stephan, Klaus Oberauer, and Gilles E. Gignac. 2013. NASA Faked the Moon Landing—Therefore, (Climate) Science Is a Hoax: An Anatomy of the Motivated Rejection of Science. Psychological Science, 24(5): 622–633. Lewandowsky, Stephan, Ullrich K. H. Ecker, Colleen M. Seifert, Norbert Schwarz, and John Cook. Misinformation and Its Correction: Continued Influence and Successful Debiasing. Psy- chological Science in the Public Interest, 13(3): 106–131. Todd K. Hartman and Adam J. Newmark. 2102. Motivated Reasoning, Political Sophistication, and Associations between President Obama and Islam. PS: Political Science & Politics, 45 (3): 449-455. Prior, Markus, Gaurav Sood, and Kabir Khanna. 2015. You Cannot be Serious: The Impact of Accuracy Incentives on Partisan Bias in Reports of Economic Perceptions. Quarterly Journal of Political Science, 10 (4): 489-518. 5 Luskin, Robert C. and Gaurav Sood. 2018. The Waters of Casablanca: On Political Misinfor- mation. Manuscript, University of Texas at Austin. Bolsen, Toby and James N. Druckman. 2015. Counteracting the Politicization of Science. Jour- nal of Communication 65: 745–769. Josh Pasek, Gaurav Sood, and Jon A. Krosnick. 2015. Misinformed About the Affordable Care Act? Leveraging Certainty to Assess the Prevalence of Misperceptions. Journal of Communica- tion, 65: 660–673. Hochschild and Einstein, chs. 3-6. D. More Debatable or Elaborate Beliefs (including Conspiracy Theories) (February 25) Lodge
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