Working Paper: CEPR ID: DP15222
Authors: Charles Angelucci; Andrea Prat
Abstract: We propose a methodology to measure knowledge of news about recent political events that combines a protocol for identifying stories, a quiz to elicit knowledge, and the estimation of a model of individual knowledge that includes difficulty, partisanship, and memory decay. We focus on news about the Federal Government in a monthly sample of 1,000 US voters repeated 11 times. People in the most informed tercile are 97% more likely than people in the bottom tercile to know the main story of the month. We document large inequalities across socioeconomic groups, with the best-informed group over 14 percentage points more likely to know the typical story compared to the least-informed group. Voters are 10-30% less likely to know stories unfavorable to their political party. Also, each month passing lowers the probability of knowing a story by 3-4 percentage points. We repeat our study on news about the Democratic Party primaries.
Keywords: media; knowledge; inequality
JEL Codes: L82; D72; D90
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| socioeconomic factors (P23) | knowledge levels (D83) |
| partisanship (D72) | knowledge (D83) |
| time (C41) | knowledge (D83) |
| knowledge levels (D83) | knowledge of main story (Y70) |