A January Pew Research Center poll showed that less than 60 percent of Americans could correctly answer questions about American politics.
Boston University professors were not surprised by the results of the News IQ Quiz, which was conducted from Jan. 14 through Jan. 17 and asked 1,003 Americans 12 multiple choice questions, ranging from to whom the U.S. owes most debt to who Steven Colbert is.
On average, people answered 5.3 of the 12 questions correctly.
Assistant professor Andrew Reeves said that although it would be ideal for people to be more informed about politics, detailed knowledge of the American political system may not be vital.
“Democracy won’t fall apart if people don’t know who the speaker of the House is,” he said.
Reeves also said participation in politics can be time-consuming, which could explain why some people are not well-informed. Ultimately, he said, people must decide what is most important to them.
“If you’re a working-class person, it’s a function of trade-offs,” he said. “Do you spend that extra five minutes after work with your kids or reading the paper?”
On top of a daily time commitment needed to keep up with politics, Reeves said a true understanding of the government and of the political system requires knowledge of history few have access to or time to learn.
BU political science professor Edouard Bustin said that to truly understand politics requires digging into the past and understanding the history of the current system.
“They say that for Europeans 100 miles is a long way, and for Americans 100 years is a long time,” he said. “What is taking place today is explained by what took place 10, 20, 100 years ago, and this is difficult for Americans.”
Understanding history may be hard for Americans, but understanding the current system is a challenge as well, said BU Director of Graduate Studies and professor Graham Wilson.
“It’s harder to be an informed voter in the U.S. than in a Parliamentary system like the English have,” he said.
Wilson also said people can be confused about who is ultimately making the important decisions in the government.
“It is really a problem of our system that it is hard to say who is responsible for what,” he said.
Because of how complicated the system is, people may turn to shortcuts to understand politics, he said.
“On a lot of things people can rely on shortcuts,” Reeves said. “If you know you’re a Republican and you’re comfortable with that choice you can use the party cue to make your decision.”
And not knowing the specifics of politics while still trusting one’s party’s decision can be problematic &- Reeves said that people sometimes vote along party lines and go against their own interests simply because they lack of a deeper understanding of the issue.
But the system, he said, can survive without each citizen knowing everything about it.
“Would it be ideal if everyone was informed? Yes,” he said. “But since it’s not feasible, can we still function as a democracy? Yes.”
Bustin said even if Americans obtain the right information, interpretation is also an issue.
“How do you analyze information once you look for it? That I think is the most important question,” he said. “We have a way of filtering out what we don’t like and recasting what we know so it’s more agreeable. Being informed and either ignoring or misunderstanding information is a serious problem.”
Politics may not have a crucial appeal on a popular scale, Wilson said.
“The point of view most people have is that politics is one of those things that just happens in the world &- it’s not everything to them,” he said.
This is an account occasionally used by the Daily Free Press editors to post archived posts from previous iterations of the site or otherwise for special circumstance publications. See authorship info on the byline at the top of the page.
