Closing the Gap: Gender, Race, and Welfare-State Knowledge

Abstract Decades of research document persistent gender and racial gaps in political knowledge. However, a growing literature shows that these gaps depend on the content of political knowledge batteries. Building on these insights, I introduce a measure of welfare-state knowledge that captures understanding of what welfare programs do, whom they serve, and how political authority is organized. Using an original survey in the United States, I compare welfare-state knowledge with canonical political knowledge and find pronounced shifts in group-knowledge patterns. Women score lower on canonical items but outperform men on welfare-state knowledge, thereby reversing the gender gap. The racial gap narrows substantially in the welfare domain, with racial minorities scoring indistinguishably from white respondents. These findings challenge prevailing narratives about group-knowledge deficits by revealing domains of political expertise that canonical measures overlook and underscoring how measurement choices shape whose political experiences are represented in the study of public opinion.