Customer Reviews

What Americans Know about Politics and Why It Matters

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*What Americans Know About Politics and Why It Matters* is an important book in that it reveals how informed voters have more stable, consistent opinions and are much more resistant to irrelevant information (such as commentary in the media and campaign rhetoric, sound bites, and photo ops). It also reveals that informed voters hold opinions that more closely match those of the Founders of the United States -- including personal responsibility and limited federal powers -- than do those who are ignorant of the issues.

knowledge scales and political sophistication are key variables in social science studies that often are used without really thinking about what they mean or measure. This book provides insight into this problem and real solutions to solve it, in addition to the primary context of how informed americans are about politics. Great work and a must have for any collection.

Anyone interested in the knowledge levels of the American public, especially in terms of political opinions and where that type of knowledge comes from, will find this book very informative and rewarding. Delli Carpini and Keeter have accumulated a very well researched and documented mass of data concerning what the American people know about many different categories of politics. In an enlightening fashion they break down political knowledge not just into different categories of information, but also by demographic categories in the general population. We find that socio-economic status is as important to political knowledge levels as personal interest or media exposure, leading to occasionally worrisome conclusions about how average people can truly make a difference.

This book does sometimes lapse into unnecessarily complex statistical models rife with under-explained regression analyses and coefficients (which should have been relegated to the Appendix section), while the writing style tends to be repetitive and is generally very verbose. Meanwhile, the conclusive analysis of "why it matters" is a bit rushed at the end of the book. But regardless of those issues, this book shows convincingly that the American public's knowledge of their own nation's politics is both more complex than may be expected, but that their knowledge is not always put to the most effective uses. Happily, the authors show that citizens typically do not consign political perceptions into simplistic liberal vs. conservative and black-and-white ideologies, as you may guess from the behavior of politicians and the media. However, we can also see here that the knowledge of the American masses is not frequently put to the best of uses, either by themselves or their leaders. [~doomsdayer520~]

This book is a very refreshing book on public opinion. Delli Carpini provides a different take on what Americans know. It was previously thought they know very little about politics, in effect that they were ignorant. It turns out that the typical citizen may not be as informed as a political scientist, but they know bits of what is going on, so they are not ignorant either. In effect, they get the big picture and most of the important details, but do not really sweat the small stuff. This means that they can handle most major decisions without needed to become a regular cliff claven on any topic because they know more about things than the elite think.

I thought it showed the ignorance of the American voter, and the dire need for voter education. In my opinion, the average American urgently needs voter education. I believe that voter education will produce a Democratic majority, and this book gave me data to back up my beliefs.