New research from Pew finds that Republicans are better informed than Democrats:
On eight of 13 questions about politics, Republicans outscored Democrats by an average of 18 percentage points, according to a new Pew survey titled “Partisan Differences in Knowledge.”
The Pew survey adds to a wave of surveys and studies showing that GOP-sympathizers are better informed, more intellectually consistent, more open-minded, more empathetic and more receptive to criticism than their fellow Americans who support the Democratic Party.
“Republicans fare substantially better than Democrats on several questions in the survey, as is typically the case in surveys about political knowledge,” said the study, which noted that Democrats outscored Republicans on five questions by an average of 4.6 percent.
The study found that Republicans understand Democrats much better than vice versa, which is just what you would expect given the liberal slant in the legacy media. Republicans can’t help but learn what Democrats think, since it’s splattered across the media. On the other hand, Democrats can easily avoid learning anything about Republicans, and clearly many do.
But it’s not just the media, the study all found that Democrats had a greater desire to avoid learning about Republican ideas than vice versa:
A March 12 Pew study showed that Democrats are far more likely that conservatives to disconnect from people who disagree with them.
“In all, 28% of liberals have blocked, unfriended, or hidden someone on SNS [social networking sites] because of one of these reasons, compared with 16% of conservatives and 14% of moderates,” said the report, tiled “Social networking sites and politics.”
The report also noted that 11 percent of liberals, but only 4 percent of conservatives, deleted friends from their social networks after disagreeing with their politics.
The study also found that Republicans were more intellectually honest:
A March Washington Post poll showed that Democrats were more willing to change their views about a subject to make their team look good. For example, in 2006, 73 percent of Democrats said the GOP-controlled White House could lower gas prices, but that number fell by more than half to 33 percent in 2012 once a Democrat was in the White House.
In contrast, the opinions of GOP supporters were more consistent. Their collective opinion shifted by only a third, according to the data.
(Via Power Line.)
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