Our Collective Political Awareness - What's Your Political IQ?

A website called Pundit Politics provides political tests on a wide range of current issues. Unlike most such political test sites, which tend to focus on one's political beliefs, each political test at Pundit Politics instead evaluates one's knowledge of the universal facts relevant to a particular topic. Whether you are a Republican, a Democrat or an Independent, these political tests offer an indication of how informed you are about the facts relevant to a particular topic in politics. And by extension, how credible (or factually based) your political persuasions truly are. This measure has been dubbed as 'The Political IQ'.

Now, with that out the way, here comes the really interesting part. Because each test question evaulates a user’s awareness of relevant facts - like say, the fact that the real growth-rate of the U.S. GDP in 2008 was 1.1% - the response data - aggregated from every respondent - can be extrapolated as a measure of public awareness regarding the question of focus.

In the example chart above, for instance, some clear conclusions can be drawn about the average respondents Political IQ in regards to the population of China. Had no one known the answer, we would have expect a correct choice rate of 20% (random guessing), rather than the observed 33%. So, at 13% over what random selection would predict, it appears that only approximately 1 out of 8 (12.5%) respondents knew, with any degree of conviction, the correct figure.

It looks like most individuals struggled choosing between 1/5 and 1/6 as their answer-choice. These people most likely used knowledge of two facts to get them even that far: 1) China has a population in surplus of 1 billion people. 2) The world’s population is over 6 billion people. Apparently, however, once people had to start figuring out how many hundreds of millions of people should be tacked on to the end of each of those figures respectively, the knowledge base broke down and people resorted to guessing.

Here is another example:

(Note: the numbers are slightly off because this question was altered)

This is another astonishing find. Although the political testing data sample is still quite small at this point, we see a surprisingly Political IQ regarding the U.S. GDP. There is only one answer-choice that is even close the correct sum - the correct answer. Choosing any of the other three answers demonstrates a complete lack of U.S. Economy IQ.

This page will be updated and added to as more political IQ testing data becomes available to me.