The Effect of Education on Political Knowledge: Evidence From Monozygotic Twins

Monozygotic twin pairs (US sample); exact n not extracted

Adult monozygotic twin pairs discordant in educational attainment.

Co-twin control design applied to political KNOWLEDGE rather than participation: comparing within MZ twin pairs removes confounding from genes and shared rearing environment. Methodologically this is exactly the design this archive's premise calls for, and it belongs in the record for that reason.

The strong observational association between education and political knowledge shrinks substantially once genetic and shared-family confounding is removed by within-MZ-pair comparison; in the authors' related Danish-twin work the remaining relationship is small and not statistically significant. The implication for this cluster is that even civic KNOWLEDGE - the one outcome civics instruction reliably moves in trials - is much less attributable to education in the observational literature than the raw gradient suggests.

Not assessed in detail; see exclusion note.

Converges with the same authors' later discordant-Danish-twin work, which reports that after accounting for familial factors the education-political-knowledge relationship is small and not statistically significant, and with Dinesen et al. 2016 on participation.