People support civics and civics supports democracy
To celebrate National Civics Day on October 27, the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library joined forces with More Perfect and other partners to host “Our Civics: Safeguarding Our Democracy.” The program featured discussions with policymakers, practitioners, funders, and other leaders in civic education to highlight the importance of civic learning in our democracy.
I found it extremely exciting to hear from Brent Buchanan from Cygnal about their polling which showed high support from the American public for civic education. He said “this is the most positive issue research I’ve had the opportunity to do in a long time … it shows what a broad base of support civic education has, and the desire for more of it,” and this held true across parties, ideologies, income levels, and more. For example, he shared with us that:
- Three-quarters of people believe it’s important to teach more about civics, and similar numbers believe it deserves more emphasis in schools (and more funding)
- Almost 70% said the events of recent years have made civic education more important
- There is near universal belief that civic education will not stifle debate, but will actually help amplify multiple points of view and perspectives
- There is wide public support for putting more African American history into schools; the data do not suggest that voters and parents are assuming that civic education is a subversive tactic to advancing “critical race theory”
- A plurality of respondents believe civic education will inspire more military service and a majority believe it will help lead to more volunteerism
Brent and I both presented at a private pre-meeting strategy session. The data I spoke to (from the Civic Language Perceptions Project) didn’t quantify the public’s support for civic education, but they did provide a perspective on how exposure to civic education can increase people’s positivity toward democracy and the concepts often associated with it. Specifically:
- People who have had civic education are 11% more familiar with democracy concepts than those without, and are 7% more positive about them than those without civic education.
- On “democracy” in particular, people with a civic education are 12.7% more positive than those without this educational experience. Other concepts with significantly higher positivity rates among those with a civic education include civility (+26.4%), bridge-builder (+14.4%), and liberty (+13.3%). In my opinion, this is interesting because these are ideals that are being critiqued a lot lately in the public discourse — and in some cases, their very legitimacy is in question. These data on positivity suggest those with civic education may be more likely to advocate for and embrace these principles.
- People who had civic education are more likely to think civic engagement activities are important to ensure democracy works. In fact, they are more likely than those without civic education to see the value in every one of the 13 actions we polled, with some of the most significant differences being: voting (+18%), serving on a jury (+17%), attending public meetings (+16%), volunteering (+14%), and serving in the military or civilian service (+12%). At PACE, we believe the “office of citizen” is critical to ensuring democracy works, and these activities are important responsibilities of such an office and ensuring representative self-governance is possible. These data points speak to the long-term impact of civic education in determining whether people will actively participate in democracy as an adult.
- Notably, 20% of those without civic education do not think there are any actions or behaviors they can conduct in order to influence whether democracy works or not (this was 5% for those with civic education). This suggests civic education may help instill a sense of agency and efficacy.
We also looked at the data by age in order to understand how young people are feeling about democracy in formative stages of life, when civic education may have the most impact in building civic dispositions and sense of individual agency. When we compared those under and over 35, we found:
- Those under 35 are more likely to say they are negative, neutral, or unfamiliar with “democracy” than those over 35. They reported the lowest positivity toward democracy of any age group at 47% — it’s also notable that they were the least likely to say they had civic education. That said, 47% is not nothing, especially when some dominant narratives right now would lead us to believe that young people don’t value democracy at all.
- Less than half (49.3%) of people under age 35 said they thought voting was important to ensure democracy works… and that was the highest rate for any of the 13 activities they could choose.
- The activities young people were more likely to than those over 35 to think were important to democracy were: joining a cause or movement (+9%), attending protests or rallies (+6.9%), working in a public service career (+1.1% [note: this is not statistically significant]), and posting on social media (+4.8%).
- Young people who did not vote in 2020 were nearly 3 times as likely to say it was because they believed their vote wouldn’t make a difference (14.7% compared with 5.3%), about 3.5 times as likely to say they didn’t think their vote would be counted (11.2% compared with 3.4%), and over twice as likely to say they didn’t like the candidates (10.7% compared with 4.8%).
To quote Brent again: “[Civic education] is one of the very first things I’ve seen in a long time where everyone can get on the same page, regardless of where they are ideologically. We have an opportunity before us right now.”
I agree. Let’s do something with it.
