Issues-based political knowledge is measurable, openly available, and essential to voting.

Evidence

As measures of political learning, these policy-related cognitions have several useful features. First, they are relatively unambiguous. Compared with prompts about candidate traits or open-ended responses about political objects, respondents who manufacture cognitions can be found out. Second, they represent important and easily available political facts. Information that Reagan was more conservative than Carter could be easily obtained from either the mass media or from conversations with political knowledgeables. The public, when aggregated, had little trouble seeing that Reagan was well to the right of Carter on every one of these issues. Finally, such elementary policyrelated knowledge is crucial in the link between voting and public policy. In fact, it is hard to imagine that anyone who paid attention to the 1980 campaign could have escaped this information. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 1719

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explains why policy-related cognitions are chosen as the measure of political learning, defining the measurement logic.