Nearly two-thirds of Americans can't name all three branches of government

Nearly two-thirds of Americans can&#039;t name all three branches of government

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last updated 8 January 2015

Wednesday was Constitution Day, but many Americans need to brush up on their knowledge of the basic structure of government the Constitution created. A survey released this week showed that only a little more than a third of adults — 36 percent — can name all three branches of government, and a whopping 35 percent couldn't name any branches of government at all.

Current political knowledge is fuzzy, too. Only 38 percent of Americans can correctly identify which party controls the House or the Senate right now, while more than 40 percent didn't even feel qualified to guess at the leadership of each house of Congress.

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.