Replication Data for: Response Options and the Measurement of Political Knowledge

By many measures, the public knows little about politics. But just how little people seem to know depends on the questions that we put to them. In particular, knowledge levels seem higher when we ask closed- rather than open-ended questions. In turn, differences between estimated knowledge levels are sometimes attributed to fundamental differences between these types of questions. Building on this research, we use a pre-registered experiment conducted with a representative national sample to shed new light on the relationship between question form and knowledge measurement. We find that inferences about political knowledge depend less on fundamental differences between open- and closed-ended questions than on two little-appreciated aspects of survey design: the number and difficulty of the response options that accompany closed-ended questions.