ABSTRACT
This chapter examines a key dimension of public attitudes - political knowledge - its measurement and impact on policy preferences and turnout. The study of political knowledge has occupied scholars of political behavior for nearly a century. Political knowledge has been defined in a variety of ways, commonly as "the range of factual information about politics that is stored in long-term memory", and alternatively as, "a measure of a citizen's ability to provide correct answers to a specific set of fact-based questions". The traditionalist approach stands in contrast to the "revisionist" school in understanding how citizens participate in political life and what they need to know in order to do so. At the individual level, shortcuts allow citizens to arrive at "true" preferences even if they start from low levels of knowledge. Rational and "reasoning" citizens simply make use of the information available to them.
