A quiz: What do you think you know about our democracy?
Photo by Leeloo The First
Democracy is complicated. We’re often reminded that it’s not a spectator sport. A large, diverse democracy such as ours requires over 200 million people to understand their multiple roles and responsibilities as citizen-participants and voters. Yet people are busy and may not have time for a “civics for everyday citizens” course – even if one existed.
To help address a need for civic awareness, CivicStory developed a 10-question history-civics survey that prompts thinking about essential concepts and can be completed in approximately three minutes.
Our aim is to enable citizens, high school age and beyond, to engage in key ideas in a way that’s fun, informative, and time effective. While basic “principles of representative democracy” may sound daunting, we find these ideas subtle and profound, and believe they should be thought about, discussed, and reconsidered through our lifetimes. They’re part of our human stories.
So why a quiz? Starting last fall, we piloted three brief surveys that had six questions each. Intriguingly, we saw notable alignment on civically-framed (non-political) questions. However, around the specific tasks of the president vs. the tasks of Congress, there was obvious confusion.
Now that we’re in a presidential primary season, and “we the people” are effectively “selection committees” tasked with determining the final two candidates, we thought it important to offer a one-stop quiz with 10 essential questions. An expanded answer key provides details on the tasks of the U.S. president.
Our “top ten” yes/no questions touch on familiar phrases in the US Constitution, as well as the frequency of elections, relationship of citizens to their representatives, political parties, the presidential office, and historic facts regarding the afternoon of January 6, 2021. While most of the questions are fact-based, some are matters of personal judgment. (The quiz has a disclaimer: not all the statements are accurate!) The survey is anonymous, and you can see how others responded after submitting your answers.
As a nonprofit, solutions-based organization, CivicStory plans to share the response data publicly on Tuesday April 9, after the quiz closes at 6 pm. Hopefully it will shed some light on citizens’ thinking in ways that are different from public opinion or “candidate preference” surveys or polls. We hope it sparks further thinking and a sense of possibility.
We also hope the quiz might encourage clearer language in the news. The current urgent debate over the design of New Jersey’s primary ballots highlights a problem of jargon in political reporting that tends to exclude or mislead. News reports refer to “party bosses”, party “insiders”, party “control” over election outcomes, a “party base”, and “party leaders.” Such references are vague, as well as non-democratic, and leave us guessing who these people actually are. Does “party leaders,” for example, mean a party’s committee members with administrative tasks on the local, county, state, or national levels? Or congressional law-makers on the state or federal levels whom we elected as our representatives?
Legally, political parties are nonprofit entities open to any eligible voter. But they’ve come to be analyzed in the news as hierarchies or “power centers” similar to private corporations. Yet nothing in their bylaws or the US Constitution supports this view. Their roles are operational, to ensure a choice of qualified candidates and to expedite fair and orderly elections.
As New Jersey unwinds from its party-influenced ballot design, hopefully we’ll also shed partisan lingo and thinking that distorts our understanding of the election process. Shifting from party-centered to citizen-centered news will give hope to people who want positive change but have felt left out.
After all, there is still time to engage millions of citizens - especially first-time voters - in the remaining primaries, and to affirm the rights of ordinary people in every state to decide who will become our official presidential nominees.
Take CivicStory’s 10-QUESTION QUIZ.
Marian Glenn, PhD, Board Secretary of CivicStory; Retired Biology and Honors Humanities Professor, Seton Hall Univ.
Susan Haig, DMA, Board VP & Founding Trustee of CivicStory; Conductor, South Orange Symphony Orchestra, NJ
Radhika Iyengar, PhD, Board Treasurer of CivicStory; Director of Education, Center for Sustainable Development, Columbia Univ.
Emily Quaye, MSN, Retired School Nurse, Heywood Avenue School, Orange, NJ