I’m a big tent Democrat. That said and with respect, SlackerInc isn’t exactly in control of or even reflective of a large voting block. More like a force of one.
I understand that you misuse statistics when you claim that the 80% of young women who are politically uninformed discredit the politically informed young women and middle-aged women who are turning out in huge numbers for Bernie. Those are the informed 20%, and you’re being insulting.
I understand that you see Americans through a Cold War lens. But that was two generations ago. I’m a little younger than you, I think, and…yeah, in my early 40’s, I’m somehow old enough to have grandkids and yet still be the “younger generation” in party politics. Do you have grandkids? Do you have kids? What do they think?
Interesting. The first thing that pops out to me is the complete lameness of that data. It’s a spreadsheet with a typo in the title and with twenty numbers total. Here are some of the data that DON’T show up in that spreadsheet:
-Who was asked questions?
-Under what circumstances?
-Was “I don’t know” an option?
-Were the questions multiple-choice?
-Were the questions about national or local politics?
-Were survey respondents under time pressure?
There’s also no information about peer review and criticism of the study.
I can’t speak to whether the claim is true. But there’s nothing in that spreadsheet to fill me with confidence about the rigor of the study. When I follow a link in the Guardian article to the original study, it’s a 404. When I go to the researcher’s website, there are a few different articles that might be the one in question, but the Guardian article doesn’t name the one they’re talking about, and anyway all the candidates that look likely to be the article in question also appear to be chapters in textbooks (I’m honestly not clear on this).
Now, I’m going to go out on a limb here, a really crazy wild limb: maybe a newspaper, JUST MAYBE, overreached in reporting a “science” story and drew conclusions that were not warranted by the evidence. I know, I know–impossible, right?
Still, I’m skeptical.
It matches my experience.
And no, foolsguinea, I’m not a grandpa. I am also in my early forties, and my youngest kid is only three. You might even be older than I am!
I did a little hunt for the original data here - not spending a huge amount of time on it TBH, but…
Media item here: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-07/esr-wwk070113.php
references this study: ‘Media System, Political Context and Informed Citizenship: A Comparative Study’ funded by the Economic and Social Research Council and led by Professor James Curran, Director of the Goldsmiths Leverhulme Media Research Centre at University of London.
…on which there’s a publically available (kinda) paper here: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Curran_James/publication/251278621_Media_System_Public_Knowledge_and_Democracy/links/5571e0db08ae7536374c5fc2.pdf
…and which was published six years ago. My knowledge of How Things Are Done in academia leads me to suspect that this survey (actually done in 2007) has probably been mined for quite a few academic papers over its lifetime, and is probably good for two or three years more. That particular paper makes it clear that the questions were different for each country, and were reflective of the stories appearing in the media of that country.
So what it was actually measuring was how much notice people are taking of the newspapers. And doesn’t seem to have been particularly focused on male/female differences to start with but, hey, if you see a statistically significant bit of data anywhere in your survey results … Write A Paper!
Ok, ok: the second thing that popped out were the international differences then. 
I was able to find some real citations though: it turns out that the gap between male and female performance in political knowledge tests is sizable and real. Half of it may be driven by higher male propensities to guess at questions though.
I just skimmed the first page of these articles:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1111/j.1468-2508.2004.00161.x?type=ref#page_scan_tab_contents
http://repository.upenn.edu/dissertations/AAI3211093/
I’m less than overwhelmed by this effect. Check out this link. Woman answered 3.6 out of 8 political questions correctly, while dudes dominated the proceedings with… 4.2 out of 8. Woo-hoo! Now that sounds like it would be statistically significant and an interesting topic of research. It’s less clear it would explain anything about propensity to support Bernie Sanders.
Thanks for digging that up! Very interesting.
Indeed. It’s also unclear why, if this sort of data is relevant, Slacker wouldn’t look at the differences between whites and racial minorities in their answers to questions and apply a similar analysis to the current primary.
I mean, I know why I wouldn’t: I think that sort of thinking tacks decontextualized data to lazy stereotyping and is mostly useful for enabling confirmation bias and propping up bigoted beliefs; furthermore, it substitutes attacks on supporters for substantive policy discussion.
But then, I wouldn’t go there with gender, either.
On the subject of Bernie versus Hilary I have, unsurprisingly, probably somewhat less of an informed opinion than the majority of this board. But on the question of gender differences I have a very great interest indeed!
Meandering round researchgate, it looks like the “gender gap” of political knowledge is legitimately a real thing, but the question of how to explain it isn’t really settled yet. There’s an interesting paper here: http://prq.sagepub.com/content/68/1/63.abstract which surveyed european boys and girls and claims that, though boys outperformed girls on the knowledge of facts, girls outperformed on reasoning about the facts.
As with most sociology, it all very much depends on what questions you ask, and how you ask them.
Mmmm…no, sorry, doesn’t dovetail with my experience. Got anything else?
(Kidding: I agree it’s a very interesting question, and far more complicated than a one-off-newspaper article is likely to get it, and definitely not a great idea to plop into the middle of a debate about electoral demographics.)
But my experience, backed by the Guardian writeup, is that older women are knowledgeable about politics; it’s young women who are not so much. That 3.6 to 4.2 (a 17% better score) is obscuring a greater disparity between young men and women.
You know it doesn’t actually matter if they’re just following a band wagon, because that band wagon is right. Young women would be better off under a Sanders government than a Clinton one.
Except that those are not the only two possibilities, and being less knowledgeable about probabilities in politics may obscure that point for them. Young men are after all well known to tolerate greater risk than any other group. The young women do not necessarily know how much risk they are being expected to take on these young men’s behalf.
Your attitude is paternalistic and offensive. Maybe you think women’s votes should be worth 3/5 of a mens one?
I’m dispassionately using evidence and logic on a board dedicated to eradicating ignorance. You are calling names.
Yeah, but all you’re bringing to the party is daily interactions with dozens if not hundreds of schoolchildren over a period of many years! Got any Chi-squared tests for that?
SlackerInc, I don’t think you’re convincing us of your points.
You say that young women follow young men, politically, and that somehow explains Bernie’s support. That is surprising to me, given how heavily female Bernie supporters I know are, but I admit I don’t have statistics. You say that young women are uninformed compared to young men, and have worse judgment, but that they are mistaken to follow young men’s bad judgment.
You say that it’s a mistake to vote for someone who is an atheist (like you) and a socialist (like you).
You have characterized your personal positions as contrary to Hillary Clinton’s, but you think you have to vote for her only if Bernie threatens to win the nomination. You say you will probably vote for Ted Cruz or Donald Trump in the GOP primary if he doesn’t. I don’t understand how you think Ted Cruz (the diametric opposite of an atheist socialist) isn’t electable, and somehow isn’t very dangerous.
I take your point in the OP seriously, but since then, you have been arguing against yourself. I guess you think it makes you sound more credible, but you have managed to make your propositions less credible because your words read as paradoxical and confused.
So far, I have seen your arguments include pessimism; a misunderstanding of actual positions of a politician you support; learned helplessness; a belief in the fundamental conservatism of US society; conventional wisdom; a failure to consider the mobilization of non-voters as more key than swing voters; and statements about young women which, while less sexist than Madeleine Albright, are clearly ageist.
You had a point, but you have spent this thread not only making the Right’s case against Sanders, but flinging mud at the American Left and American youth.
I gotta say…
Thank you. I feel much more prepared to take Bernie through November! 
Except you’re not, your grasping at straws implying that women are too stupid to know who is actually best for them to vote for because they don’t “understand politics” what ever that means.
And you’re convincing exactly no one to change their mind. BTW I didn’t insult you, I insulted your idea, important difference.
I’m going to take issue with this a little. My substantive argument is that a) interest in politics (alas) while correlated with knowledge isn’t the same as knowledge. And b) moreover, the spreads documented so far just aren’t sufficient to get the sort of effects that SlackerInc is alleging.
I don’t have too much problem bringing this up for discussion here though, as frankly the differences aren’t especially large** and anyway beyond a certain point current events are a hobby as much as anything else. Not to everyone’s taste.
I do recall reading in the Economist an evolutionary psychological take on political activism. Yeah, it tends to be concentrated on the young and no, it correlates weakly with knowledge. A fair amount of it could very well be some sort of mating display.
Pollster: Tell me about who makes the decisions in your home.
Female Respondent: Well, I make the small decisions and my husband makes the big decisions
Pollster. Ookay, could you give some examples of small decisions?
FR: Well I choose where the kids will go to school, what car we’ll be buying, how much to set aside for the college fund, things like that?
Pollster: Um, ok, what does your husband decide on?
FR: Oh, what we should do about ISIS, whether to support the President’s tax plan…
** I allege that a wider gap would be required to spot differences in political knowledge between males and females in casual conversation.
Good points as usual, Measure.
No. I defended Steinem’s statement (which she has unsurprisingly been intimidated into walking back) by noting that young women are uninformed about electoral politics specifically, while noting that they are better educated than young men overall. And I never said anything about their judgement, which I think is *better *than that of young men, for sure. If Dr. Evil gave me the option to press one of two buttons, marked “MEN” and “WOMEN”, and whichever gender’s I pressed would retain the right to vote (while if I pressed neither, they both would lose it and he would become dictator), I would press the “WOMEN” button without hesitation. 