Every September, the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center releases its annual survey on Americans’ knowledge of the Constitution. The survey has, for nearly two decades, charted the ebb and flow of civic awareness in the United States. The latest results, released recently, suggest that something unusual is happening: Americans are remembering—or perhaps relearning—how their government works.
This year, seventy percent of respondents could name all three branches of the federal government, up from sixty-five percent the previous year. Nearly four in five correctly identified freedom of speech as a right guaranteed by the First Amendment. And the survey’s authors attribute the shift to the torrent of executive orders and legal challenges produced in the opening year of Donald Trump’s second term.
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It seems intuitively right that the Trump presidency has fostered an increase in the percentage of Americans who have basic knowledge of their civic rights and responsibilities.
The increases from last year were not all that large, but they all trend in the same direction. It is also notable that very large numbers of Americans remain ignorant of the most basic civic knowledge, such as the 30 percent who cannot name the three branches of the federal government.
We take the modest increases in civic knowledge as a mostly positive sign. The more people know about how our republic is supposed to work, the better the chances of its actually working. Trump’s influence on this, we suspect, is that he has made civics interesting. Whether the poll respondents were moved by enthusiasm for his policy initiatives or by opposition to them, they have a new reason to pay attention.
The survey results come with cautions, however.
Trust in the Supreme Court continues to erode—just forty-one percent of Americans report moderate or greater trust, while a majority express little or no trust at all. A bipartisan consensus has formed around proposals for reforming the Court, from term limits to ethics rules. That Americans can recognize constitutional structures and rights while simultaneously doubting the highest court in the land is a reminder that civic knowledge is not the same as civic confidence.
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Even so, it is encouraging that more Americans are looking up from their screens long enough to recall how their government is designed to function.
A republic, after all, depends on citizens who know what it is.
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Image: “Annenberg Public Policy Center – UPenn” by on Wikipedia
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