The aim of the authors is to describe the political knowledge of ordinary Poles, including the structure of their knowledge about politics and ways of thinking about it. The empirical material analyzed here comes from in-depth interviews conducted with interviewers differing by age, level of education, and degree of interest in matters connected with politics and public life. As a theoretical framework, the authors use Shawn W. Rosenberg’s concept. The authors’ analyses serve to show Poles’ process of thinking about politics; their main lines of argumentation and justification of appraisals, opinions, and views; and their most important sources of information. Due, among other things, to the growth in easy access to sources of information, it would appear above all that the ability to select information has greatly increased in importance, and the striking quality of Poles’ political knowledge is its fragmentation, ephemerality, emotionality, and low degree of systematicity.
