Political knowledge and voter turnout

This paper examines the relationship between a voter's level of political knowledge and the choice to vote. The issue of voter turnout is one of the major topics in American politics and has been studied extensively. This study seeks to fill a gap in the current body of academic research that fails to account for the significance of political knowledge as a predictor of voter turnout. Since political knowledge is, in part, a product of many other variables (including both socio-demographic and psychological), it serves as a single predictor that can encompass elements of other predictors. Using 2004 NES data, this study shows that an increase in campaign political knowledge is significantly correlated with an increase in the likelihood that the respondent will vote.