Abstract
It is a well-known fact that “don't know” (DK) responses are likely to occur in political attitude questions in a questionnaire survey. Usually, such DK responses are treated as missing values. On the other hand, some previous studies suggested that DK responses on political attitudes reflect the respondent's negative attitude toward politics. If this interpretation is correct, we can expect that there is a relationship between DK responses and political behavior. The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between DK responses and political behavior (voting behavior and participation in political activities) by using a nation-wide panel survey data. The analyses show that respondents with a higher number of DK responses tend not to participate in political activities.
