Considering an overlooked aspect of political sophistication, a recent paper by Rebasso, Schumacher, and Rooduijn (2026) finds that emotional involvement is not driven by factual knowledge but rather people’s interest in politics and the degree of confidence in their knowledge.
What is “Political Sophistication”?
Since “political sophistication” has been defined differently by different scholars, Rebasso et al. (2026) outline three distinct approaches. The first approach views political knowledge as the main aspect of political sophistication. In the second approach, factual knowledge is accompanied by ideological beliefs, interest and participation. Lastly, scholars have identified “confidence-in-knowledge” - a general feeling that one’s knowledge on politics is correct - as an important aspect of political sophistication (next to knowledge and interest). These differences in definition have also led to different ways of measuring sophistication with studies using, for example, only knowledge items, separate items on interest and knowledge or combined indexes. By investigating the effect of knowledge, interest, and confidence-in-knowledge on emotional responses in two preregistered original studies (including an experiment manipulating confidence-in-knowledge) and analyses of three ANES waves (2012, 2016, 2020), Rebasso et al. extend the existing research. Since they consider the three aspects individually as well as in relation to each other, their approach allows the authors to provide a more nuanced analysis of the sophistication-emotion link.
How are sophistication and emotions linked?
To better understand the link between political sophistication and emotional responses to politics, Rebasso et al. apply “appraisal theory” which views emotions as results of evaluations of our environment. According to this theory, we judge situations based on different dimensions, like their relevance to our personal goals, who we deem responsible and whether we have the agency to change a situation. Anger, for example, emerges from high certainty and feelings of agency about an event. Therefore, those who view politics as relevant to their personal goals, (i.e. political sophisticates), would experience stronger emotional responses to them.
Additionally, Rebasso et al. theorize that knowledge about politics does not have a significant impact on emotional responses, as it only increases understanding, not personal relevance. The authors note that political sophisticates are well-practiced at making appraisals about politics and may, thus, more easily be able to remember them (e.g. when prompted by a survey). Since this mechanism does not require the appraisals to be correct, which leads the authors to hypothesize that it is interest and confidence-in-knowledge that drive emotional reactions instead. Interest, on the one hand, increases the relevance of politics to an individual’s goals and consequently can be expected to produce higher emotional reactions. Confidence-in-knowledge, on the other hand, might increase the efficiency of appraisals and increase their certainty, leading to high certainty emotions like anger and pride. In other words, if someone believes that they are knowledgeable on politics, they will evaluate more decisively how to feel about political events.
What do Rebasso et al. find out?
To test their hypotheses, the authors made use of five datasets, including the three most recent waves of the American National Election Study (2012, 2016, 2020) and two pre-registered original studies conducted in the Netherlands and the United States in 2022. Generally, they find a positive but low correlation between political interest and knowledge, a slightly stronger correlation between confidence and political interest and a weak correlation between confidence-in-knowledge and knowledge.
Turning to political sophistication’s link to emotional responses, Rebasso et al. find interesting results. While the authors expected that knowledge and emotional responses are entirely unrelated, the study finds that they are only mostly unrelated with several cases showing a negative relation. Interest, on the other hand, shows substantive effects on hope, fear, and anger - at times being more impactful than even ideology. Nevertheless, the type of emotions produced and size of impact of political interest on emotions seems to vary by time as well as geographical context.
With regards to confidence-in-knowledge, the authors find significant and positive relation to self-reported emotions. Interestingly, the effects differ for the two cases: In the Dutch sample the study finds positive effects of confidence-in-knowledge on anger, anxiety, hope and pride. Both U.S. data sources, on the other hand, show sizable positive relations of confidence to anger and anxiety and no relation between confidence and hope. Only for the ANES 2020 sample the authors find a weak negative relation between confidence and pride. For some models, the effects of confidence disappeared when controlling for interest. This might be explained by either the specific questionnaire design and/or the correlation of confidence-in-knowledge and interest which makes fully isolating their effects difficult.
The authors also test the causal relationship between confidence-in-knowledge and emotional responses to politics, by manipulating participants’ confidence through varying the difficulty of questions on their political knowledge. As expected, those who received more difficult questions reported lower levels of confidence. Further, the manipulation had the expected effect on emotions with participants reporting higher levels of anger about politics after being given easier - confidence-inducing - questions; other emotions did not consistently differ by condition. This underscores anger as the standout causal outcome of confidence-in-knowledge.
What are the broader implications?
By identifying political interest and confidence-in-knowledge as the key drivers of emotional engagement and establishing a causal link between confidence and feelings of anger about politics, the authors make significant contributions to the research on the sophistication-emotion link. Firstly, they demonstrate the importance of distinguishing between political knowledge, political interest, and confidence-in-knowledge when discussing political sophistication. Secondly, Rebasso et al. increase an understanding of confidence-in-knowledge as a separate factor of political sophistication and show that it has a consistent influence on feelings of anger about politics. Their findings have multiple real-world implications: If confidence increases anger, people with low confidence may be less likely to attribute blame and engage themselves politically. On the flipside, misinformed high-confidence individuals run the risk of spiraling through increasing anger. Further, the study’s findings suggest a potentially limiting effect of knowledge on emotionality. Thus, the authors recommend that programs seeking to improve civic engagement aim to balance knowledge dissemination with building confidence and interest in politics. (31.03.2026, Hannah Segers)
