A new survey from the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center has found significant gaps in Americans’ basic civic knowledge, with more than one-third of U.S. adults unable to name all three branches of government.
According to the survey, conducted Aug. 6-9, just 65 percent of respondents correctly identified the executive, legislative, and judicial branches. The nationally representative sample included 1,034 U.S. adults and carried a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.
The findings, highlighted by The Gateway Pundit’s Mike LaChance, raise uncomfortable questions about the state of civic education and the broader national discourse.
First Amendment Knowledge Also Lacking
The survey also probed Americans’ familiarity with the First Amendment, and the results were similarly uneven. Freedom of speech was the most commonly recognized protection, named by 73 percent of respondents. But only 43 percent identified freedom of religion, 31 percent named freedom of assembly, 29 percent named freedom of the press, and just 12 percent named the right to petition the government.
Only 9 percent of respondents could name all five First Amendment protections. Roughly a quarter β 24 percent β could not name a single one.
Confusion between the First and Second Amendments was also prevalent: 25 percent of respondents mistakenly said the right to bear arms, which is protected under the Second Amendment, is a First Amendment right.
Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director emerita of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, offered a stark assessment of the implications.
“Ignorance is costly. You can’t protect and cherish rights that you don’t know you have,” she said.
A Recurring Pattern
The results echo prior Annenberg surveys that have documented persistent shortfalls in civic literacy. The center has conducted annual Constitution Day surveys for years, and while some measures have fluctuated, the share of Americans who can recite the basic structure of their government has remained far from universal.
What makes the latest figures notable is the contrast between the public’s confidence in its political opinions and its grasp of the fundamentals. The survey suggests that a substantial portion of the electorate holds strong views about how the government should operate while lacking a firm command of how it is organized.
The three branches β executive, legislative, and judicial β form the core architecture of the U.S. system of separated powers. The executive branch is headed by the president, the legislative branch consists of Congress, and the judicial branch includes the Supreme Court and lower federal courts. The system of checks and balances among them is a foundational concept taught in civics classes nationwide.
Critics of the education system have long pointed to declining scores on national civics assessments as evidence that the subject has been deprioritized. The Annenberg survey adds another data point to that argument.
The findings arrive amid a broader national conversation about media literacy, misinformation, and the quality of public debate. If a third of Americans cannot name the branches of government, the survey suggests, the baseline of shared civic knowledge that undergirds democratic deliberation may be thinner than many assume.
The survey’s margin of error means the true figure could range between roughly 61.5 percent and 68.5 percent for those who correctly named all three branches β still leaving a sizable minority unable to do so.
Annenberg’s data has also shown that First Amendment rights beyond speech are frequently misidentified or simply unknown to many respondents, with the right to petition β a cornerstone of the American revolutionary tradition β recognized by only about one in eight adults.
For now, the survey stands as a snapshot of a country in which most people can name at least some of the fundamentals of their government, but a stubborn and significant slice cannot name all of them β or, in some cases, any.
The Annenberg Public Policy Center, based at the University of Pennsylvania, has been tracking public knowledge of constitutional principles since the 1990s. Its annual surveys are widely cited by educators, journalists, and policymakers as a gauge of civic health.
Source: www.thegatewaypundit.com β https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2026/09/academic-survey-finds-35-percent-americans-cant-name/