A series of media polling institutions have asked Americans how they want the US to react on the Ukrainian crisis. It turned out that most Americans actually know very little about events on the ground - or even where the ground is geographically located. The researches found out that the farther the respondents' guesses were from Ukraine’s actual location, the more they wanted the US to intervene there using military force, the Washington Post reports.
On March 28-31, 2014, a national sample of 2,066 Americans were asked what action they wanted the USto take in Ukraine, but with a twist: In addition to measuring standard demographic characteristics and general foreign policy attitudes, we also asked our survey respondents to locate Ukraine on a map as part of a larger, ongoing project to study foreign policy knowledge. The point was to learn if this knowledge (or lack of it) is related to their foreign policy views.
About one in six (16 percent) Americans correctly located Ukraine, showing it on the map somewhere within its borders. Most thought that Ukraine was located in Europe or Asia, but the median respondent was about 1,800 miles off - roughly the distance from Chicago to Los Angeles — locating Ukraine somewhere in an area bordered by Portugal on the west, Sudan on the south, Kazakhstan on the east, and Finland on the north.
In general, younger Americans tended to provide more accurate responses than their older counterparts: 27 percent of 18-24 year olds correctly identified Ukraine, compared with 14 percent of 65+ year-olds. Men tended to do better than women, with 20 percent of men correctly identifying Ukraine and 13 percent of women. Interestingly, members of military households were no more likely to correctly locate Ukraine (16.1 percent correct) than members of non-military households (16 percent correct), but self-identified independents (29 percent correct) outperformed both Democrats (14 percent correct) and Republicans (15 percent correct). Unsurprisingly, college graduates (21 percent correct) were more likely to know where Ukraine was than non-college graduates (13 percent correct), but even 77 percent of college graduates failed to place Ukraine on a map correctly.
Does it really matter whether Americans know where Ukraine is on a map or not? Previous research would suggest it does. Information can influence Americans’ attitudes about the kind of policies they want their government to carry out and the ability of political elites to shape that agenda.
Similarly to other recent polls, we found that although Americans are not exactly sure what to do with Ukraine, they are more likely to oppose action in Ukraine the costlier it is - 45 percent of Americans supported boycotting the G8 summit, for example, while only 13 percent of the respondents supported using force.
The less literate the poll participants were, the more they wanted the US to use force, the greater the threat they saw Russia as posing to US interests, and the more they thought that using force would advance American national security interests.
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