A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Words. A Visual Test of Political Knowledge: Does It Reduce the Effect of Age and Gender?

Beyond any doubt, political knowledge is a crucial resource for citizens of democratic societies. It enables them to participate in politics in a more effective manner, and to identify more successfully the candidate and the political party that best represents her/ his beliefs and preferences (Delli Carpini & Keeter, 1996). We also know from decades of accumulated research that there are strong and persistent inequalities in the level of political knowledge, based on gender, patterns of media use, education level, and age. A routine finding in this literature is that women, young people, and the lowly educated score systematically lower with regard to levels of political knowledge (Prior, 2005). Given the central role of political knowledge in political science research, it is all the more troublesome that currently there is no generally accepted standard to measure political knowledge in a reliable and balanced manner. In addition, there are strong concerns about the validity of the commonly used measurement instruments. Therefore, in this note, we report on a test using a "visual" measure of political knowledge. More specifically, we have two main goals: First, we investigate whether including visual knowledge leads to different levels of knowledge compared to more traditional measures. Second, we investigate its effect on the gender gap and age gap that is routinely found in research on political knowledge. © 2021 Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.