On Monday, April 7, 2014 4:21:16 PM UTC-4, F*O*A*D wrote:
Joshua Tucker: The following is a guest post from political scientists

Kyle Dropp (Dartmouth College) Joshua D. Kertzer (Harvard University)

and Thomas Zeitzoff (Princeton University).



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Since Russian troops first entered the Crimean peninsula in early March,

a series of media polling outlets have asked Americans how they want the

U.S. to respond to the ongoing situation. Although two-thirds of

Americans have reported following the situation at least "somewhat

closely," most Americans actually know very little about events on the

ground -- or even where the ground is.



On March 28-31, 2014, we asked a national sample of 2,066 Americans

(fielded via Survey Sampling International Inc. (SSI), what action they

wanted the U.S. to 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. We wanted to see where Americans think Ukraine is and to

learn if this knowledge (or lack thereof) is related to their foreign

policy views. We found that only one out of six Americans can find

Ukraine on a map, and that this lack of knowledge is related to

preferences: The farther their guesses were from Ukraine's actual

location, the more they wanted the U.S. to intervene with military force.



Ukraine: Where is it?



Survey respondents identified Ukraine by clicking on a high-resolution

world map, shown above. We then created a distance metric by comparing

the coordinates they provided with the actual location of Ukraine on the

map. Other scholars, such as Markus Prior, have used pictures to measure

visual knowledge, but unlike many of the traditional open-ended items

political scientists use to measure knowledge, distance enables us to

measure accuracy continuously: People who believe Ukraine is in Eastern

Europe clearly are more informed than those who believe it is in Brazil

or in the Indian Ocean.



About one in six (16 percent) Americans correctly located Ukraine,

clicking somewhere within its borders. Most thought that Ukraine was

located somewhere in Europe or Asia, but the median respondent was about

1,800 miles off -- roughly the distance from Chicago to Los Angeles.



http://tinyurl.com/law5ul5



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My guess is that if you gave Americans an outline map of the "Lower 48"

states in the U.S.A., and asked them to write in the names of the

states, the percentage getting all of them correct would be -maybe- 25%.



"Where's the Ukraine?" "Oh, somewhere near the Yukon, right?"

MORE CLIP N PASTE GARBAGE BY THE ****.