Hohenheim Inventory Of Political Knowledge (Hip): Scale Construction

The political knowledge of citizens is regarded as an important basis of a democracy and has been studied extensively. However, no scale covers relevant theoretically derived dimensions of political knowledge and is accessible for academic research. Therefore, we developed the Hohenheim Inventory of Political Knowledge (HIP) based on the Rasch model. It covers the dimensions (a) general facts (political structures and historical facts) and (b) current issues (topics and actors of various political areas). A German-wide online survey (N = 1,082) revealed satisfactory weightedmean square (WMNSQ) infit values for the 85 items (0.82 <= x <= 1.24) and an expected-a-posteriori/plausible-values (EAP/PV) reliability of .92 for the one-dimensional model and of .91 for both dimensions. The scale was validated: Person scores correlated with political interest, political participation, political information use (criterion validity), and subjective knowledge of our participants (convergent construct validity). We discuss the challenge of adapting the dimension current issues to changing political circumstances and future steps of scale validation.