The Effects of General and Domain-Specific Expertise on Political Memory and Judgment

In this article we differentiate between general political sophistication and domain-specific expertise, and we develop a theoretical argument specifying how the two levels differ and the nature of their impact on a variety of memory and judgment processes. Subjects, differentiated according to level of political sophistication and expertise in the income tax system, were provided with detailed information about the Tax Reform Act of 1986, and they were required to process this information under different manipulated encoding sets. They were then asked to recall the information and to provide a number of political judgments. The results indicate that the two types of expertise have distinct and theoretically meaningful consequences for political cognition. General political sophistication (but not domain-specific expertise) facilitated evaluative clustering and on-line processing. Domain-specific experts showed enhanced overall recall and larger selective memory effects, with some evidence that these effects were strengthened by general sophistication. Finally, there was evidence of an interactive relationship on attitude stability and the priming of presidential evaluations.