International political knowledge based on an individual and contextual approach: evidence from Brazil

Abstract

Recent literature has tried to identify which factors determine international political knowledge. This article, using data collected by ‘The Americas and the World: Public Opinion and Foreign Policy’ project in its 2014/2015 edition, attempts to better answer this question by incorporating new evidence from Latin America. As the literature predicts, we show that traditional microlevel variables such as education, gender, and income, explain differences in international political knowledge. In addition, we find that including a macrolevel variable into the analysis — city size— makes the model more accurate and better predicts a person’s international political knowledge while considering the context in which he/she is inserted.