The Pew Research Center has a news quiz online right now that allows people to be tested on some of the questions included in their recent survey of political knowledge, and to compare their scores with those of the poll respondents. I am pleased to report that I got all of the questions right. Of course, this might have something to do with the fact that I read the survey report before I took the quiz.
I liked the Pew test. Though it is impossible to say what score I would have gotten without cheating, I am confident I would not have screwed up enough to embarrass myself. This is because the questions were relevant to important political issues that I might actually be able to do something about, such as shooting off an outraged email to some elected official or browbeating an in-law who needs to be convinced not to vote the wrong way.
The surveys I really hate are those that purport to assess my capacity to be a good citizen by asking me to identify some person who turns out to be the Senate majority leader (Harry who?) or to name two justices on the Supreme Court (I know Sandra Day O’Connor retired, and William Rehnquist is probably dead, but I think Ruth Ginsburg is still in there, and Clarence Thomas—yeah, definitely Clarence Thomas). Then the report comes out, and for about a week to follow (and, sporadically, for months or even years after that), various media, academicians, and pundits point to the results as alarming evidence that Americans don’t know nothin’—the implication being that I don’t know nothin’, either.
This flies in the face of my fairly firm conviction that I do know somethin’.
Does it matter that I can’t tell you with any certainty how long the term of a U.S. representative is—It’s two years, right? That seems awfully short—if I vote, and vote with strong awareness of the issues, in every single congressional election that comes along? I can never keep track of how long it has been since the previous one, and the fact just has not come up in casual conversation in a long, long time; but let there be an election for U.S. representative, and, baby, I am there.
Does it matter that I couldn’t tell you (in answer to one survey question that was asked in 2004) whether the federal debt was 7.5 trillion dollars or 8.5 trillion dollars? What I did know then was that it was MUCH TOO BIG, and getting bigger all the time, and I was pretty sure I knew why.
Does it matter that I have to think really hard (and for much longer than I feel a survey interviewer would be willing to let me think) to come up with the name of the chief justice of the Supreme Court? What I did know at the time he was appointed was that I objected violently to an earlier nominee to the bench and wrote to my representative (whoever the hell he is) and to both U.S. Senators to say so.
In a December 2005 article in Public Opinion Pros, Stephen Bennett wrote,
One concern frequently expressed about survey items of this type is that they do not probe the panoply of what people know about public affairs. One frequently hears that it is possible to form all sorts of well-grounded policy opinions without knowing, for example, who is vice president or Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. As Philip Converse noted in 1975, the problem with this argument is that it does not come to grips with the fact that many of the same people who lack information about these kinds of questions are ignorant about more fundamental political questions as well.
Happily, I don’t think Converse was talking about the likes of me. While it is true that I can’t name as many state legislators as I can crew members on the starship Enterprise, I do, unlike many survey respondents, take the trouble to distinguish between Joe Lieberman and Bart Simpson, at least at election time. And, sure, the amount of information I need rattling around in my head for day-to-day survival prohibits me from keeping little details like the number of U.S. Cabinet members in a mental space whence I can spit them out on demand. But with a few hints and a little prompting, I can probably tell you enough about the really important issues of the day that you will be sorry you asked.
And I am as sure of that as I am that George W. Bush is the forty-second—uh, forty-third—president of the United States. Almost as sure.
—Lisa Ferraro Parmelee, Editor
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