The survey polled students with multiple-choice questions, including but not limited to: who is the president of the Senate? How long are senators’ and representatives’ term-lengths? Who is the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court? The survey results showed a disconnect between the respondents and facts, with an equal share of students identifying President Joe Biden as president of the senate as identified Vice President Kamala Harris.
But experts at Hunter College’s Department of Political Science in New York City caution that results of surveys like these should not be taken at face value.
Dr. Leah Christiani, an associate professor of political science at Hunter, said that these kinds of surveys that are often narrowly defined with “’gotcha’ questions” have “done a poor job of actually capturing” whether or not college-age Americans know little about politics. Christiani noted that ACTA did not perform a control survey of similarly aged respondents who were not in college, which offered no comparison to reflect on college students’ civic comprehension.
While Dr. Lina Newton, an associate professor of political science at Hunter, agreed that the questions provided by the ACTA survey tended towards assessing trivial knowledge, she said the surveys can be an important starting place to consider Americans’ overall lack of civic understanding and the duty of postsecondary institutions to close that gap. By shaping students’ understanding outside the national spectrum, where so much news media is often focused, institutions can help them these students their vote has the potential to make a real difference.
“This has been a long complaint about Americans, period. We have relatively low levels of civic knowledge, and how can we continue to function as a democracy with low levels of knowledge, when the founders of the Constitution clearly and explicitly wanted Americans to be civically virtuous and engaged in politics,” said Newton. “The founders expected people to be active in lower levels [of politics], and education was supposed to help create these virtuous citizens.”
Hunter College requires all students to take an Introduction to American Government course, whether they are pursuing the study of political science or not. Newton said while students may not have been able to answer the questions the ACTA survey specifically asked, many come to class with a general understanding of the national landscape of politics.
