Lupia, Arthur. "How Elitism Undermines the Study of Voter Competence". Critical Review, Vol.18, No.1-3 (2006): 217-232.

Lupia, Arthur. "How Elitism Undermines the Study of Voter Competence". Critical Review, Vol.18, No.1-3 (2006): 217-232.

• Academic studies of voter knowledge and competence measure the 'political knowledge' of voters using a set of questions which can be later checked against known facts, in addition to records of political opinions (218).
• Most scholars take broad implications from the consistently low levels of response on these political knowledge questions, 'proving' that 1/3 of respondents are 'know-nothings' without relevant political knowledge (218, 220).
• The political knowledge, as they are constructed to represented political facts such the name of the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, only matter in the day-to-day lives of the professional class. This means that the set of political knowledge measured is constructed by the political class to the advantage of the political class (218-219).
• It is entirely unclear why knowing many of the standard political knowledge questions is important. For the average voter, the questions do not directly affect their ability to make rational political choice during voting and should not be used as a measure of voter competence (22-221).
• When measuring voter competence it is necessary to distinguish between necessary political knowledge and helpful political knowledge, where only the first is relevant to the ability of the voter to make a rational political decision. Many current voter competence studies fail to distinguish this, and assume that their sets of political facts are necessary (221-223).
• Only a range of political facts are sufficient for a voter to be competent, and sometimes the political facts are not even directly relevant to competence. Oftentimes non-essential facts can led to supporting groups or figures, who endorsement of a position serves as a proxy for political knowledge -- something that demonstrates competence, but is not reflected in political knowledge (227-228).
• Knowledge about the proxies for political knowledge is enough for a voter to be sufficiently competent, as if they had the same level of knowledge as a political knowledgable voter. For example, knowing about and supporting the Democrats makes one competent to choose Democratic candidates, regardless of individual knowledge (230).
• The vast majority of the questions used in academic studies to gauge political knowledge are not correlated with actual voter competence (224), meaning that the substance of these questions is instead based in the elitism of scholars, academics, and politicians (225).
• Part of this structure of elitism is an undue focus on politics at the federal level to the exclusion of local politics. Most people look at politics on the regional level or lower, and make their political decisions based on these factors. Therefore national-level criteria of knowledge are not good indicators of overall voter competence (225-226).