POL 346 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Mike Pence, Veto, Motivated Reasoning
4 Sep 2018
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Document Summary
Why is knowledge important: democracy functions best when its citizens are politically informed, counterpoints: (1) heuristics, (2) motivated reasoning (future weeks, knowledge matters for opinions and vote choice, knowledge. sophistication is related to a lot of different political outcomes. Institutions and processes: how does the senate work, the supreme court, the presidency, what are the names of the parties, etc. People and parties: do you know who the president is, what the two main parties are, which party controls the senate right now, domestic politics. The types of knowledge people hold matter: general facts linked to education (ex. Rules of the game, which party is more liberal, etc): media attention linked to surveillance and policy-specific facts (ex. Current political events and policy debates: gillens (2001)- many people who are fully informed in terms of general political knowledge are nonetheless ignorant of policy-specific information that would alter their political judgments .
