Political scientists recently polled Americans on
their knowledge of where Ukraine is located and their policy
recommendations related to the ongoing crisis there. The results
show that, perhaps unsurprisingly, the more ignorant an American is
about the location of the former Soviet country, the more likely he
or she is to support U.S. intervention.
According to the polling, done by political scientists Kyle
Dropp of Dartmouth College, Joshua D. Kertzer of Harvard, and
Thomas Zeitzoff of Princeton, the median respondent was about 1,800
miles off when trying to click on Ukraine on a high-resolution map.
According to the map of the results (shown below), some Americans
think that South Africa, Australia, China, France, Greenland, and
Brazil are Ukraine. Shockingly, some respondents seem to think that
Ukraine is inside the U.S.
Perhaps more shocking than the astonishing ignorance of
geography demonstrated by those polled is the relationship between
this ignorance and support for intervention.
From
a post written on the polling at The Washington Post‘s
Monkey Cage:
Even controlling for a series of demographic characteristics and
participants’ general foreign policy attitudes, we found that the
less accurate our participants were, the more they wanted the U.S.
to use force, the greater the threat they saw Russia as posing to
U.S. interests, and the more they thought that using force would
advance U.S. national security interests; all of these effects are
statistically significant at a 95 percent confidence level.
Our results are clear, but also somewhat disconcerting: The less
people know about where Ukraine is located on a map, the more they
want the U.S. to intervene militarily.
The post also mentions that two-thirds of Americans claim to be
following the situation in Ukraine at least “somewhat closely.”
According to Reason’s polling,
58 percent of Americans want to stay out of the current mess in
Ukraine altogether and only 8 percent support sending in
troops.
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