Center for the Study of Democracy

Pierre Bourdieu’s theories of political competence and the political field have not been used widely in studies of political life in the United States. But these concepts offer a more theoretically grounded and coherent way of understanding how people in this country do and do not engage with politics than most conventional approaches to political participation. I argue that Bourdieu’s notion of “political competence” (1979:126; 1984:405-6) allows us a much more full understanding of the ways that disenfranchised people relate to the political process. I use analyses of the full (1978 – 2004) General Social Survey to do three things: first, to challenge commonly accepted renditions of the causes of the “don’t know” response to political questions; second, to explore the relationship between “don’t know” response and income and education; and finally to argue that don’t know response is indicative of low “political competence” – not simply a lack of resources or knowledge. I find that education and income are significant and important in predicting no response levels for political questions of various types but are insignificant and/or unimportant for other types of questions; and that political question response levels are substantively and significantly associated with the probability of voting in a presidential election.