Luke Bell and Jeremy Pope, Political Science
Introduction
In recent years, significant attention has been directed toward the role and relevance of the Constitution in contemporary politics. Conservative and Tea Party voters, for example, tout their dedication to the “founding principles” in the Constitution. Despite the prevalence of Constitutionally-charged rhetoric among political activists, national surveys have repeatedly found that most Americans are, at best, poorly informed about the nation’s founding document.
This project was designed to gauge levels of Constitutional knowledge among Utah voters, focusing on how knowledge of the Constitution varies by basic political knowledge, ideology, support for the Tea Party, political party, and personal and ideological interest. Do voters tend to know more or less about the Constitution than they know about other elements of political life? Are Tea Party supporters and conservatives truly more informed about the Constitution than those with other ideological views? Survey results shed light on these important questions.
Methodology
In order to discover how much Utah voters know about the Constitution, I formulated and fielded a series of six factual questions about the Constitution on the April 2014 Utah Voter Poll, a recurring online poll of Utah voters. The poll garnered 799 valid responses and had a margin of error of + or – 3.47%. For purposes of comparison, I also included five general political knowledge questions on the November 2013 Utah Voter Poll. Table 1 (below) contains specific question wording and the accuracy rates for the questions about the Constitution.
After collecting survey responses, I analyzed the data using a variety of statistical tests. Most of the response accuracy metrics are the result of simple cross-tabulations. In order to discover the impact of variables such as ideology, political party, Tea Party status, education, and income, I used negative binomial regression analysis with the number of correct answers (ranging from 0-6) as the dependent variable. Finally, to evaluate whether general political and Constitutional knowledge are separate domains (meaning that a significant number of people are informed about one topic but ignorant of the other) I used factor analysis. In all of these statistical tests, the data were weighted to maximize the representativeness of my results as a reflection of the true population of Utah voters.
Results
In terms of overall knowledge, my primary finding is that Utah voters do not have a thorough understanding of many fundamental aspects of the Constitution. Out of the six questions asked, the average respondent was able to correctly answer only 2.47 questions, which equates to 40%. Only 2% of respondents earned perfect scores, while 14% missed all six questions.
A tabulated comparison of Constitutional knowledge by self-reported political party, ideology, and Tea Party status suggests that conservative respondents not significantly more knowledgeable about the Constitution than other survey participants. In fact, conservative participants actually achieve slightly lower scores than the Democratic and liberal voters in the sample. On the other hand, the average score for those who identify themselves as active supporters of the Tea Party was slightly better (46%) than the overall average (40%) and non-supporters (44%). In all of these comparisons, however, the differences in knowledge between groups are not statistically significant, meaning that we cannot be sure that the difference in knowledge is not zero. Put differently, there is relative ideological and partisan parity when it comes to knowledge about the Constitution among Utah voters.
The results of negative binomial regression reinforce the results above: ideology and political party identification are not significant determinants of the variation in knowledge. Instead, other factors—notably education—are more powerful predictors of Constitutional knowledge. On another note, the factor analysis comparing the Constitution-oriented questions to those dealing with basic political facts reveals that political and Constitutional knowledge go hand in hand. Overall, a significant majority of participants that good understanding of the Constitution also scored well on the general political items. In other words, Constitutional knowledge is likely not a separate domain of political information.
Discussion
As mentioned previously, overall levels of Constitutional knowledge are quite low among Utah voters. The results are particularly surprising given the fact that survey respondents scored well above average on the general political questions. Moreover, although performance on the Constitution questions improved with education, even respondents with advanced degrees answered only 49% of the questions correctly. That a highly informed and politically engaged group of citizens performed poorly when asked about basic Constitutional facts does not bode well for the broader public. Knowledge about core aspects of the Constitution is likely to be even lower among citizens less educated and politically engaged than the participants of this study.
Conclusion
In sum, the results of this study suggest that knowledge about the Constitution among Utah voters is generally quite low. While education and general political knowledge correspond with above-average performance, Constitutional knowledge scores remained surprisingly low for a politically active sample. Knowledge did not vary significantly based on ideological or partisan differences or support for the Tea Party movement. Furthermore, knowledge about the Constitution seems to be directly associated with general political knowledge; respondents who were well-informed about the Constitution overwhelmingly tended to achieve high scores on the general knowledge items.