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Argues citizens possess significant political competence through interpersonal knowledge, challenging conventional views.
The average citizen scores poorly on tests that measure political knowledge. Does this suggest anything about whether such citizens are politically competent? In this paper, I argue that citizens are so competent, despite lacking what is typically construed as “political knowledge.” This is because citizens possess a kind of knowledge in common, one that has yet to be taken seriously by skeptics and supporters of democracy alike: citizens have knowledge of other persons, which grounds their politically-salient competence for mutual consideration.
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Jaclyn Rekis (2026) studied this question.
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