Political learning depends on education and interest, not information scarcity.

Evidence

Start with a cognitive model. As ever, education matters. Surely college-educated, rather than grade-school-educated, people can better extract issue-oriented information from the hurly-burly of campaign rhetoric. To education, add interest. We now understand that the already well informed and motivated will be most likely to learn (Neuman, 1986; Tichenor, Donohue, & Olien, 1970). Having a knowledge base both marks a more permanent interest in, and capacity for, politics as well as provides the framework in which new information can be integrated to produce increments in knowledge. After all, information about presidential candidates fills the air: learning requires not a search for information but instead an inclination to pay attention to, and make sense of, what is readily available. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 1727

Categorization

• XREF: Directly engages the knowledge-gap hypothesis (Tichenor et al., 1970) and its later modernizations like Zaller’s RAS model.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: the claim that political information ‘fills the air’ — how does the media-inundation era interact with the knowledge-gap prediction that the well-informed stay the most informed?