THE GOVERNMENT IGNORANCE GAP

In a “VOICES FROM ASPA" video that ran on this website a couple of weeks ago, Valerie Lemmie, senior advisor of state and local government at the Charles F. Kettering Foundation, told us that “I am at times surprised how little our graduate students know about civics and then I am reminded that we don’t teach it in school anymore, you don’t learn it in high school. You don’t learn it in college. And so, it’s incumbent upon you, who are preparing for the profession (in public administration) to learn the history. . . “

We couldn’t agree more.

A 2024 study from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which evaluated survey instruments from 2,000 registered voters,  found that “more then 70% of Americans fail a basic civic literacy quiz on topics like the three branches of government, the number of Supreme Court justices and other basic functions of our democracy. Just half were able to correctly name the branch of government where bills become laws.

“While two thirds of Americans say they studied civics in high school, just 25% say they are “very confident” that they could explain how our system of government works.”

And consider this: These are registered voters. While we don’t have data about this, it’s our guess that people who aren’t registered to vote are probably even less knowledgeable. But on the other hand, and we don’t want to seem overly cynical, if we’re right about that, perhaps we’re all better off if people who have little or no notion of how government works don’t vote at all. It’s kind of like our desire for people who don’t have drivers licenses to stay off the roads.  

A couple of years ago, we looked at the state of civics education in the nation’s schools, and discovered a 2024 Hoover Institution report that found that eight U.S. states — Alaska, Delaware, Kansas, Maine, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Vermont and Wyoming — required neither a civics course nor a civics test for students to receive a high school diploma. Just four states — Idaho, Louisiana, Virginia and West Virginia — require a full-year civics course and the passing of a standard civics test.

Nationwide, there’s long been a dramatic shortage of funding to help young people get a grasp of how their government works. In 2024, the Carnegie Corporation of New York released a report titled “Connecting Civic Education and a Healthy Democracy.” The study found “funding for civic learning (from both philanthropy and government) is woefully inadequate.” For example, the data shows the US invests “just 50 cents in civic education for every 50 dollars that goes to education in the science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) subjects.”

While the ignorance about government isn’t new, we’d argue that it’s even more important now than in the past. In a world in which disinformation about governmental policies has reached epidemic proportions, we can’t help but wonder how well-equipped Americans are to evaluate the actions their government are taking, if they don’t have a solid idea of how it functions in the first place.

Meanwhile, and we’ve written about this before, there is clearly a widespread lack of comprehension about what level of government does what. While there’s general knowledge that the army and navy are run by the federal government, when it comes to basic interactions with the functioning of government, that’s hardly the case.

People may complain about how bad their roads are. But do they know whether the pothole they’ve encountered is the responsibility of their city, county or state? They generally do not, in our experience. (Note that this was also a topic recently raised by Michael Jacobson, former Deputy Director of Performance and Strategy in a recent guest column on this website.)

Though it’s likely that educated Americans are more likely to understand the basic questions of civics, even they often miss the idea that government is a lot more than just politics. We’ve complained about this in the past but it’s a never-ending source of frustration to us that when we meet someone new at a public gathering and try to explain what we do for a living and say we research and write about government, their immediate next question (assuming they find this interesting at all) is about politics.

While there may be interest in the passage of individual policies, when it comes to discussions of policy implementation, that’s when our new acquaintances generally excuse themselves to get another glass of wine or use the restroom.

Management of government simply isn’t on the radar for many. While they may complain about the so-called “bureaucracy,” meaning the people who they think are wasting their hard earned tax dollars, they don’t seem to get that it’s behind the scenes employees who ensure that their garbage is  picked up, their bridges don’t fall into the river, the elections are run fairly, their children are educated, and on and on.

With trust in government low (and not just for the federal government, but for states and localities), this is all a real pity. It’s simply too easy to mistrust the unknown. 

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