Anachro-Knowledge: Officeholder Change and Outdated Political Knowledge

Scholarship on political knowledge recognizes a difference between static and surveillance knowledge: the former includes rarely changing facts such as features of constitutions and institutions, while the latter can include the identities of officeholders and policy-relevant facts. Although some scholars have argued for the relevance of surveillance knowledge, one overlooked feature of surveillance knowledge is that less attentive citizens can have information about the political world that is not precisely “right” or “wrong” but rather, outdated. For example, in answering a question identifying the holder of a prominent political position, one might wrongly name the prior officeholder, either because one did not notice the office had changed hands, or because the habit of associating that person with that office interfered with the ability to correctly answer the question in real time. In this paper, we explore this phenomenon, with an eye toward understanding how individuals who possess outdated knowledge (or respond to surveys in a manner consistent with possessing outdated knowledge) compare to individuals who get these questions completely right or completely wrong. Drawing on a survey of eleven large and medium-sized U.S. cities with political knowledge questions tailored to each respondent’s state and city, we explore correct, incorrect, and outdated identifications of key actors at three levels of government: Speaker of the House, governor, and mayor. In particular, we focus on the temporal dimension: what are the direct and conditional effects of the length of time since an office has changed hands?