What Does the Public Know About Economic Policy, And How Does It Know It?(Part 2‪)‬

Does Information Breed Knowledge? We begin with estimates of equation 2, which explains our admittedly imperfect measure of knowledge by information sources (the quantity and nature of sources used by respondents), the desire to be informed, education, and other demographic variables. We tried measuring respondents' sources of information in three different ways: by [Q.sub.H] and [Q.sub.L], the two intensity-of-use variables defined earlier; by the respondent's primary source of information; and by a set of twenty-two dummy variables indicating, for each of the eleven sources, whether the respondent reported using that source at least occasionally. We found that, once demographics were controlled for, the twenty-two source dummies were jointly insignificant (at the 10 percent level). Therefore we eliminated the third option and concentrated on the other two.