Multi-Level Political Knowledge Data
Most surveys of political knowledge ask what Americans know about Washington. This dataset, built with Todd Makse of Florida International University, asks what they know about the place they actually live. Across two waves — April 2022 and June 2023 — 3,171 respondents in twenty American cities answered a battery of knowledge questions written specifically for their own city: who the mayor is, who the police chief is, which office sets the property tax rate, how long a mayoral term runs. Parallel batteries cover national and state politics, so knowledge at the three levels can be compared within the same respondent rather than across different samples. The twenty cities were selected to be collectively representative of medium-sized and large American cities, and each record carries survey weights, a standard set of demographics, media-consumption measures, and neighborhood characteristics drawn from the American Community Survey for the respondent’s ZIP code tabulation area.
- Codebook (PDF) — full documentation of the dataset: how it was fielded, the twenty cities and their codes, every variable with its coding, the national and local knowledge batteries item by item, the neighborhood measures and where they come from, and an honest account of the limits
Anyone interested in the data file should contact me at clarkn@susqu.edu.
