Who Knows Best? Education, Partisanship, and Contested Facts

An alert, informed electorate is considered vital to a robust democracy, and the main path to that electorate includes formal education. The educated citizen is politically attentive, knowledgeable, and participatory, and the uneducated citizen is not. However, this fact conceals a less favorable effect of education. Educated citizens possess the cognitive skills to reject facts inconsistent with prior dispositions. And educated citizens are among the most invested partisans. Thus education is indispensable for an ideal democratic citizen, but that same education can create a resistant, insular democratic participant. We examine this duality across several prominent empirical cases where political facts are in dispute and employ goal-oriented information processing theory to generate hypotheses. In each case, we find that the most educated partisans are furthest apart in their factual understanding. Our primary concern resides with the inability of education to overcome powerful partisan motives; education intensifies those motives.