Does the political knowledge gender gap extend to knowledge about federalism, an institutional arrangement that increases the cognitive demand on voter knowledge? We answer this question by drawing upon data from three national surveys administered in Canada between 2020 and 2022. We find evidence of a gap between men and women in terms of their knowledge of the distribution of authority across the three orders of government. Across four of our knowledge items, the gender gap favouring men gets smaller as the issues vary from the federal to provincial to municipal level. Knowledge about national defence and sewage/water, however, do not fit this pattern. These results suggest future research should examine whether the gendered knowledge gap with respect to federalism can be explained by which levels of government have responsibility over areas of jurisdiction that have a strong effect on or are used by women on a daily basis.

The article addresses ongoing debates in the study of political knowledge and voting behavior. The article identifies significant divergences in previous work which may explain why such debates persist, including in the measurement of political knowledge and the inclusion of confounding variables. The article remedies these issues in an observational study examining how political knowledge affects the impact of spatial considerations and cognitive shortcuts on the vote. The article also contributes the first randomized experiment on this research question in the literature. Using the framework of conjoint analysis, the experiment evaluates how political knowledge affects the impact of spatial considerations and cognitive shortcuts on the vote. The article hypothesizes that political knowledge will increase the impact of spatial considerations on the vote but will not modify the impact of cognitive shortcuts. This expectation is supported in both the observational and experimental results.