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Presidential Campaigns and the Knowledge Gap in Three Transitional Democracies

Purdue University

Chappell Lawson

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Analysis of panel data from Brazil, Mexico, and Russia suggests that presidential campaigns have ambiguous effects on inequalities in political knowledge. In all three countries, the "knowledge gap" among citizens with different levels of socioeconomic resources stayed the same or widened. At the same time, less affluent and educated citizens who paid a great deal of attention to the campaign learned more than equally attentive high-status citizens. These findings suggest that modern, media-intensive electoral campaigns do provide information to low socioeconomic status citizens in readily digestible form, but they fail to stimulate sufficient attention to politics among these citizens to close the knowledge gap.

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