Dynamika wiedzy politycznej Polaków
The Dynamics of Political Knowledge in Poland

Summary/Abstract: The main objective of the present paper is to examine various aspects of political knowledge in Poland. First, we are interested to know what sociodemographic traits determine the level of political knowledge. Second, we want to describe the dynamics of political knowledge: we want to discover whether and how its level changes during democratic consolidation in Poland. Last but not least, we test the hypothesis related to political knowledge influence on propensity to vote.In the empirical part we use PNES 1997-2015 data. Due to numerous limitations of traditional measure of political knowledge – battery of questions about political facts– we test alternative measure of the phenomenon, based on the accuracy of estimating the political party’s position in the multidimensional space of political competition.Our results suggest that Poles’ political knowledge and its relationship with important socio-political variables does not change over time. What is more, the new index of political knowledge has proven to be an important determinant of electoral behaviour which increases a propensity to vote.

• Details
• Contents