Monday, August 8, 2016

American Accuracy

What kinds of political knowledge questions are Americans best at? I was messing with a 2012 national data set that includes several such questions so I decided to run a quick-and-not-at-all-clean analysis to see which questions respondents performed the best on, which they sucked at.


% Correct
Terms Prez Can Serve
90.2
Who is VP
85.1
Size of Defense Budget
83.2
What is Medicare
78.3
Who Controls House
74.5
Mitt Romney’s Religion
68.4
Who Controls Senate
66.8
Who is Speaker of House
40.0
Barack Obama’s Religion
37.9
Length of Senate Term
35.8
Spending Comparison
33.3
Who is Chief Justice
32.7
Who is Prime Minster UK
19.1

Lots of folks know the president can serve up to two terms, or the name of the vice president. Far fewer know the names of the chief justice or the prime minster of the U.K. No surprise there. And Obama's religion scores rather low because of the various theories that he's secretly Muslim.

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