Is this the result of the U.S. education system:
Party On, Dudes!
Ignorance is the Curse of the
Information Age
by Matthew Robinson
Almost any look at what the average citizen knows about politics is bound to be
discouraging. Political scientists are nearly unanimous on the subject of voter ignorance. The
average American citizen not only lacks basic knowledge but also holds beliefs that are
contradictory and inconsistent. Here is a small sample of what Americans "know":
Nearly one-third of Americans (29 percent) think the Constitution guarantees a job.
Forty-two percent think it guarantees health care. And 75 percent think it guarantees a high
school education.
Forty-five percent think the communist tenet "from each according to his abilities, to each
according to his needs" is part of the U.S. Constitution.
More Americans recognize the Nike advertising slogan "Just Do It" than know where the
right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" is set forth (79 percent versus 47 percent).
90 percent know that Bill Gates is the founder of the company that created the Windows
operating system. Just over half (53 percent) correctly identified Alexander Hamilton as a
Founding Father.
Fewer than half of adults (47 percent) can name their own Representative in Congress.
Fewer than half of voters could identify whether their congressman voted for the use of force
in the Persian Gulf War.
Just 30 percent of adults could name Newt Gingrich as the congressman who led Republican
congressional candidates in signing the Contract with America. Six months after the GOP
took congress, 64 percent admitted they did not know.
A 1998 poll by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press showed that 56
percent of Americans could not name a single Democratic candidate for president; 63
percent knew the name "Bush," but it wasn't clear that voters connected the name to George
W. Bush.
According to a January 2000 Gallup poll, 66 percent of Americans could correctly name
Regis Philbin when asked who hosts Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, but only 6 percent
could correctly name Dennis Hastert when asked to name the Speaker of the House of
Representatives in Washington.
Political scientists Michael X. Delli Carpini and Scott Keeter studied 3,700 questions
surveying the public's political knowledge from the 1930's to the present. They discovered
that people tend to remember or identify trivial details about political leaders, focusing on
personalities or simply latching onto the policies that the press plays up. For example, the
most commonly known fact about George Bush while he was president was that he hated
broccoli, and during the 1992 presidential campaign, although 89 percent of the public knew
that Vice President Quayle was feuding with the television character Murphy Brown, only 19
percent could characterize Bill Clinton's record on the environment.
Their findings demonstrate the full absurdity of public knowledge: More people could identify
Judge Wapner (the longtime host of the television series The People's Court) than could
identify Chief Justices Warren Burger or William Rehnquist. More people had heard of John
Lennon than of Karl Marx. More Americans could identify comedian-actor Bill Cosby than
could name either of their U.S. senators. More people knew who said, "What's up, Doc,"
"Hi ho, Silver," or "Come up and see me sometime" than "Give me liberty or give me death,"
"The only thing we have to fear is fear itself," or "Speak softly and carry a big stick." More
people knew that Pete Rose was accused of gambling than could name any of the five U.S.
senators accused in the late 1980s of unethical conduct in the savings and loan scandal.
In 1986, the National Election Survey found that almost 24 percent of the general public did
not know who George Bush was or that he was in his second term as vice president of the
United States. "People at this level of inattentiveness can have only the haziest idea of the
policy alternatives about which pollsters regularly ask, and such ideas as they do have must
often be relatively innocent of the effects of exposure to elite discourse," writes UCLA
political science professor John R. Zaller.
All of this would appear to be part of a broader trend of public ignorance that extends far
beyond politics. Lack of knowledge on simple matters can reach staggering levels. In a 1996
study by the National Science Foundation, fewer than half of American adults polled (47
percent) knew that the earth takes one year to orbit the sun. Only about 9 percent could
describe in their own words what a molecule is, and only 21 percent knew what DNA is.
Esoteric information? That's hard to say. One simple science-related question that has grown
to have major political importance is whether police ought to genetically tag convicted
criminals in the hopes of linking them to unsolved crimes. In other words, should police track
the DNA of a convicted burglar to see if he is guilty of other crimes? Obviously issues of
privacy and government power are relevant here. Yet how can a poll about this issue make
sense if the citizenry doesn't understand the scientific terms of debate? Asking an evaluative
question seems pointless.
The next generation of voters—those who will undoubtedly be asked to answer even tougher
questions about politics and science—are hardly doing any better on the basics. A 2000
study by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni found that 81 percent of seniors at
the nation's fifty-five top colleges scored a D or F on high school-level history exams. It turns
out that most college seniors—including those from such elite universities as Harvard,
Stanford, and the University of California-do not know the men or ideas that have shaped
American freedom. Here are just a few examples from Losing America's Memory:
Historical Illiteracy in the 21st Century, focusing on people's lack of knowledge about our
First Citizen—the man whose respect for the laws of the infant republic set the standard for
virtue and restraint in office.
Barely one in three students knew that George Washington was the American general at the
battle of Yorktown—the battle that won the war for independence.
Only 42 percent could identify Washington with the line "First in war, first in peace, first in the
hearts of his countrymen."
Only a little more than half knew that Washington's farewell address warned against
permanent alliances with foreign governments.
And when it comes to actually explaining the ideas that preserve freedom and restrain
government, the college seniors performed just as miserably.
More than one in three were clueless about the division of power set forth in the U.S.
Constitution.
Only 22 percent of these seniors could identify the source of the phrase "government of the
people, by the people, and for the people" (from Lincoln's Gettysburg Address).
Yet 99 percent of college seniors knew the crude cartoon characters Beavis and Butthead,
and 98 percent could identify gangsta rapper Snoop Doggy Dogg.
Apparent ignorance of basic civics can be especially dangerous. Americans often "project"
power onto institutions with little understanding of the Constitution or the law. Almost six of
ten Americans (59 percent) think the president, not Congress, has the power to declare war.
Thirty-five percent of Americans believe the president has the power to adjourn Congress at
his will. Almost half (49 percent) think he has the power to suspend the Constitution (49
percent). And six in ten think the chief executive appoints judges to the federal courts without
the approval of the Senate.
Some political scientists charge that American ignorance tends to help institutions and parties
in power. That is hardly the active vigilance by the citizenry that the founders advocated.
Political scientists continue to debate the role of ignorance and the future of democracy when
voters are so woefully ignorant. As journalist Christopher Shea writes, "Clearly, voter
ignorance poses problems for democratic theory: Politicians, the representatives of the
people, are being elected by people who do not know their names or their platforms. Elites
are committing the nation to major treaties and sweeping policies that most voters don't even
know exist."
Professors Delli Carpini and Keeter discovered, for example, that most Americans make
fundamental errors on some of the most contested and heavily covered political questions.
"Americans grossly overestimate the average profit made by American corporations, the
percentage of the U.S. population that is poor or homeless, and the percentage of the world
population that is malnourished," they write. "And, despite twelve years of antiabortion
administrations, Americans substantially underestimate the number of abortions performed
ever year."
With most voters unable to even name their congressperson or senators during an election
year, the clear winner is the establishment candidate. Studies by Larry Bartels at Princeton
University show that mere name recognition is enough to give incumbents a
5-percentage-point advantage over challengers: Most voters in the election booth can't
identify a single position of the incumbent, but if they've seen the candidate's name before,
that can be enough to secure their vote. (In many cases, voters can't even recognize the
names of incumbents.)
Media polls are typically searching in vain for hard-nosed public opinion that simply isn't
there. Polls force people to say they are leaning toward a particular candidate, but when
voters are asked the more open-ended question "Whom do you favor for the presidency?"
the number of undecided voters rises. The mere practice, in polling, of naming the candidates
yields results that convey a false sense of what voters know. When Harvard's "Vanishing
Voter Project" asked voters their presidential preferences without giving the names of
candidates, they routinely found that the number of undecided voters was much higher than in
media polls. Just three weeks before the 2000 election, 14 percent of voters still hadn't made
up their minds.
Even when polling covers subjects on which a person should have direct knowledge, it can
yield misleading results because of basic ignorance. The nonpartisan Center for Studying
Health System Change (HSC) found that how people rate their health care is attributable to
the type of plan they think they are in more than their actual health insurance. The center
asked twenty thousand privately insured people what they thought of their coverage, their
doctor, and their treatment. But instead of just taking their opinions and impressions, the
center also looked at what coverage each respondent actually had.
Nearly a quarter of Americans misidentified the coverage they had. Eleven percent didn't
know they were in an HMO, and another 13 percent thought they were in an HMO but were
not. Yet when people believed they were in a much-maligned HMO (even when they
actually had another kind of insurance), their perceived satisfaction with their health care was
lower than that of people who believed they had non-HMO coverage (even when they were
in an HMO). Similarly on nearly all ten measures studied by the center, those HMO enrollees
who thought they had a different kind of insurance gave satisfaction ratings similar to those
who actually had those other kinds of insurance.
Once center researchers adjusted for incorrect self-identification, the differences between
HMO and non-HMO enrollees nearly vanished. Even on something as personal as health
care, citizens display a striking and debilitating ignorance that quietly undermines many polling
results.
After looking at the carnage of polls that test voter knowledge rather than impressions, James
L. Payne concluded in his 1991 book The Culture of Spending:
Surveys have repeatedly found that voters are remarkably ignorant about even simple,
dramatic features of the political landscape. The vast majority of voters cannot recall the
names of congressional candidates in the most recent election; they cannot use the labels
"liberal" and "conservative" meaningfully; they do not know which party controls Congress;
they are wildly wrong about elementary facts about the federal budget; and they do not know
how their congressmen vote on even quite salient policy questions. In other words, they are
generally incapable of rewarding or punishing their congressman for his action on spending
bills.
Ignorance of basic facts such as a candidate's name or position isn't the only reason to
question the efficacy of polling in such a dispiriting universe. Because polls have become
"players in the political process," their influence is felt in the policy realm, undercutting efforts
to educate because they assume respondents' knowledge and focus on the horse race. Is it
correct to say that Americans oppose or support various policies when they don't even have
a grasp of basic facts relating to those policies? For instance, in 1995, GrassRoots Research
found that 83 percent of those polled underestimated the average family's tax burden. Taxes
for a four-person family earning $35,000 are 54 percent higher than most people think.
Naturally when practical-minded Americans look at political issues, their perceptions of
reality influence which solutions they find acceptable. If they perceive that there are fewer
abortions or lower taxes than there really are, these misperceptions may affect the kinds of
policy prescriptions they endorse. They might change their views if introduced to the facts. In
this sense, the unreflective reporting on public opinion about these policy issues is deceptive.
The Wall Street Journal editorial page provides another example of how ignorance affects
public debate. Media reports during the 1995 struggle between the Republicans in Congress
and the Clinton White House continually asserted that the public strongly opposed the GOP's
efforts to slow the growth of Medicare spending. A poll by Public Opinion Strategies asked
one thousand Americans not what they felt but what they actually knew about the GOP plan.
Twenty-seven percent said they thought the GOP would cut Medicare spending by $4,000
per recipient. Almost one in four (24 percent) said it would keep spending the same. Another
25 percent didn't know. Only 22 percent knew the correct answer: The plan would increase
spending to $6,700 per recipient.
Public Opinion's pollsters then told respondents that true result of the GOP plan and
explained: "[U]nder the plan that recently passed by Congress, spending on Medicare will
increase 45 percent over the next seven years, which is twice the projected rate of inflation."
How did such hard facts change public opinion about Medicare solutions? Six of ten
Americans said that the GOP's proposed Medicare spending was too high. Another 29
percent said it was about right. Only 2 percent said it was too low.
Indeed polling and the media may gain their ability to influence results from voter ignorance.
When a polling question introduces new facts (or any facts at all), voters are presented with a
reframed political issue and thus may have a new opinion. Voters are continually asked about
higher spending, new programs, and the best way to solve social ills with government
spending. But how does the knowledge base (or lack of knowledge) affect the results of a
polling question? That is simply unknown. When asked in a June 2000 Washington Post
poll how much money the federal government gives to the nation's public schools, only 31
percent chose the correct answer. Although only 10 percent admitted to not knowing the
correct answer, fully 60 percent of registered voters claimed they knew but were wrong. Is
there any doubt that voters' knowledge, or lack thereof, affects the debate about whether to
raise school spending to ever higher levels?
Reporters often claim that the public supports various policies, and they use such sentiment
as an indicator of the electoral prospects of favored candidates. But this, too, can be
misleading. Take, for instance, the results of a survey taken by The Polling Company for the
Center for Security Policy about the Strategic Defense Initiative. Some 54 percent of
respondents thought that the U.S. military had the capability to destroy a ballistic missile
before it could hit an American city and do damage. Another 20 percent didn't know or
refused to answer. Only 27 percent correctly said that the U.S. military could not destroy a
missile.
What's interesting is that although 70 percent of those polled said they were concerned about
the possibility of ballistic missile attack, the actual level of ignorance was very high. The
Polling Company went on to tell those polled that "government documents indicate that the
U.S. military cannot destroy even a single incoming missile." The responses were interesting.
Nearly one in five said they were "shocked and angry" by the revelation. Another 28 percent
said they were "very surprised," and 17 percent were "somewhat surprised." Only 22 percent
said they were "not surprised at all." Finally 14 percent were "skeptical because [they]
believe that the documents are inaccurate."
Beyond simply skewing poll results, ignorance is actually amplified by polling. Perhaps the
most amazing example of the extent of ignorance can be found in Larry Sabato's 1981 book
The Rise of Political Consultants. Citizens were asked: "Some people say the 1975 Public
Affairs Act should be repealed. Do you agree or disagree that it should be repealed?" Nearly
one in four (24 percent) said they wanted it repealed. Another 19 percent wanted it to
remain in effect. Fifty-seven percent didn't know what should be done. What's interesting is
that there was no such thing as the 1975 Public Affairs Act. But for 43 percent of those
polled, simply asking that question was enough to create public opinion.
Ignorance can threaten even the most democratic institutions and safeguards. In September
1997, the Center for Media and Public Affairs conducted one of the largest surveys ever on
American views of the Fourth Estate. Fully 84 percent of Americans are willing to "turn to the
government to require that the news media give equal coverage to all sides of controversial
issues." Seven in ten back court-imposed fines for inaccurate or biased reporting. And just
over half (53 percent) think that journalists should be licensed. Based on sheer numbers—in
the absence of the rule of law and dedication to the Bill of Rights—there is enough support to
put curbs on the free speech that most journalists (rightly) consider one of the most important
bulwarks of liberty.
In an era when Americans have neither the time nor the interest to track politics closely, the
power of the pollster to shape public opinion is almost unparalleled when united with the
media agenda.
For elected leaders, voter ignorance is something they have to confront when they attempt to
make a case for new policies or reforms. But for the media, ignorance isn't an obstacle. It's
an opportunity for those asking the questions—whether pollster or media polling director—to
drive debate. As more time is devoted to media pundits, journalists, and pollsters, and less to
candidates and leaders, the effect is a negative one: Public opinion becomes more important
as arbiter for the chattering classes. But in a knowledge vacuum, public opinion also becomes
more plastic and more subject to manipulation, however well intentioned.
Pollsters often try to bridge the gap in public knowledge by providing basic definitions of
terms as part of their questions. But this presents a new problem: By writing the questions,
pollsters are put in a position of power, particularly when those questions will be used in a
media story. The story—if the poll is the story—is limited by the questions asked, the
definitions supplied, and the answers that respondents are given to choose from.
The elevation of opinion without context or reference to knowledge exacerbates a problem
of modern democracies. Self-expression may work in NEA-funded art, but it robs the
political process of the communication and discussion that marries compromise with
principle. Clearly "opinion" isn't the appropriate word for the melange of impressions and
sentiment that are presented as the public's beliefs in countless newspaper and television
stories. If poll respondents lack a solid grasp of the facts, surveys give us little more than
narcissistic opinion.
As intelligent and precise thinking declines, all that remains is a chaos of ideologies in which
the lowest human appetites rule. In her essay "Truth and Politics," historian Hannah Arendt
writes: "Facts inform opinions, and opinions, inspired by different interests and passions, can
differ widely and still be legitimate as long as they respect factual truth. Freedom of opinion is
a farce unless factual information is guaranteed and facts themselves are not in dispute."
If ignorance is rife in a republic, what do polls and the constant media attention to them do to
deliberative democracy? As Hamilton put it, American government is based on "reflection
and choice." Modern-day radical egalitarians—journalists and pollsters who believe that polls
are the definitive voice of the people—may applaud the ability of the most uninformed citizen
to be heard, but few if any of these champions of polling ever write about or discuss the
implications of ignorance to a representative democracy. This is the dirtiest secret of polling.
Absent from most polling stories is the honest disclosure that American ignorance is driving
public affairs. Basic ignorance of civic questions gives us reason to doubt the veracity of most
polls. Were Americans armed with strongly held opinions and well-grounded knowledge of
civic matters, they would not be open to manipulation by the wording of polls. This is one of
the strongest reasons to question the effect of polls on representative government.
Pollsters assume and often control the presentation of the relevant facts. As a blunt
instrument, the pollster's questions fail to explore what the contrary data may be. This is one
reason that public opinion can differ so widely from one poll to another. When the citizens of
a republic lack basic knowledge of political facts and cannot process ideas critically,
uninformed opinion becomes even more potent in driving people. Worse, when the media fail
to think critically about the lines of dispute on political questions, polls that are supposed to
explore opinion will simplify and even mislead political leaders as well as the electorate.
When the media drive opinion by constant polling, the assumption of an educated public
undermines the process of public deliberation that actually educates voters. Ideas are no
longer honed, language isn't refined, and debate is truncated. The common ground needed
for compromise and peaceful action is eroded because the discussion about facts and the
parameters of the question are lost. In the frenzy to judge who wins and who loses, the media
erode what it is to be a democracy. Moments of change become opportunities for spin, not
for new, bold responses to the exigencies of history.
Not only are polls influenced, shaped, and even dominated by voter ignorance, but so is
political debate. The evidence shows that ignorance is being projected into public debate
because of the pervasiveness of polls. |
