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Just the Facts: Citizen Issue Comprehension

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Personality and the Challenges of Democratic Governance

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Abstract

The author focuses directly on the Big Five’s role in causing individuals’ failure to understand basic facts about important political issues. The chapter looks at individuals’ responses to factual survey questions in five policy areas—(1) food stamps, (2) same-sex marriage, (3) health insurance subsidies, (4) drug testing welfare recipients, and (5) U.S. oil production. As one would expect, partisanship plays an important role in driving incorrect understandings about what is happening in these policy areas. However, partisanship is not the only cause. While a substantial amount of personality research has spent time attempting to draw connections between one or the other Big Five personality traits and political ideology and partisanships, here the author shows that personality does not simply work through its effects on citizens’ partisanship. It has its own independent effect on how people understand political issues, even highly partisan ones.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    As a further demonstration that motivated reasoning is the domain of the most politically engaged, on September 16, 2016, the Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump held an event in order to declare whether he personally believed the unequivocal fact that President Obama was born in the USA. Belief in facts is now a subjective policy position to be declared by a presidential candidate.

  2. 2.

    As of June 2016, not one welfare applicant or recipient in the state of Michigan has tested positive for drugs (Felton 2016).

  3. 3.

    The report is no longer available on the Fox News website, but can be found on Real Clear Politics (Real Clear Politics. 2013).

  4. 4.

    See the U.S. Department of Agriculture summary statistics (U.S.D.A. 2017).

  5. 5.

    Full results tables for each model are available from the author.

  6. 6.

    I also estimated ordered logit and multinomial logit models with a three-point-dependent variable coded 0 if correct, 1 if answered don’t know, and 2 if incorrect. While there are some minor shifts in the results, the overall picture is the same. The results of these other models are available upon request.

  7. 7.

    The demographic information for each respondent was provided by Survey Sampling International.

  8. 8.

    In order to make all the discussions regarding the substantive meaning of these results easily comparable, I always produce these values by moving from a score at the 10th percentile of the variable to the 90th percentile of the variable and base them on the model that includes all of the control variables.

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  1. Political Science, Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis, Indianapolis, Indiana, USA

    Aaron Dusso

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Dusso, A. (2017). Just the Facts: Citizen Issue Comprehension. In: Personality and the Challenges of Democratic Governance. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-53603-3_3

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