by Brandon Burley and The Redemption Project
Civic education can remove barriers and help people participate. But the evidence suggests knowledge works best when voters can also see a meaningful choice, understand the consequences and believe there is somewhere for their voice to go.
Imagine teaching someone everything they need to know about Tennessee government.
What the governor can do.
What the Legislature controls.
Why the August primary matters.
Who sets property-tax rates.
What a county commissioner does.
How to register.
Where to vote.
When early voting begins.
Then imagine that person looks at the ballot and finds one candidate.
Or sees two names but believes the outcome was decided months ago.
Or cannot identify anything the office does that affects their life.
Or thinks nobody in government will listen either way.
Have we created a more informed citizen?
Probably.
Have we created a voter?
Not necessarily.
That distinction matters as Tennessee continues wrestling with participation.
Civic literacy can teach people where the levers are. Participation requires some reason to believe pulling one matters.
Start with an uncomfortable finding
The obvious argument for civic education is straightforward.
Teach people more about government and elections, and they should participate more.
The research is not that simple.
Political scientists Aaron Weinschenk and Christopher Dawes examined high-school civic education and voting later in adulthood using a large longitudinal dataset that included academic transcripts.
At first, civics coursework appeared connected to higher turnout.
But after accounting more carefully for family background and other characteristics — including comparisons between siblings — much of the effect disappeared. Their conclusion was that the turnout effect of additional civics coursework was probably small at best.
That is not an argument against teaching civics.
Understanding government has value whether or not it produces another vote.
It does tell us that knowledge alone may not be the missing ingredient.
Knowing the three branches of government does not automatically tell someone why the county primary next Tuesday deserves an hour of their day.
Practical civic knowledge appears to be different
Now change the lesson.
Instead of explaining federalism, show someone exactly how to register.
Researchers Elizabeth Bennion and David Nickerson tested that idea across more than 1,000 college classrooms involving more than 25,000 students.
Some students received brief classroom presentations explaining voter registration. Others did not.
The presentations increased voter registration by about 6 percentage points and eventual turnout by roughly 2.6 percentage points. The researchers verified participation against voter records rather than relying only on students saying they had voted.
That is an important distinction.
The intervention was not:
Democracy is important.
It was:
Here is how you participate in it.
A small procedural barrier had been removed.
And participation moved.
Tennessee has evidence that those procedural gaps still matter. ThinkTennessee reviewed more than 1,600 calls made by Tennesseans to an election-protection hotline across the 2020, 2022 and 2024 federal election cycles. Many callers needed basic information about registration or polling places; others encountered issues that may have prevented them from voting, including missed registration deadlines, registration problems and absentee ballots that did not arrive in time.
Sometimes civic disengagement is philosophical.
Sometimes somebody just does not know the deadline.
A serious civic-literacy strategy has to understand the difference.
People participate more when there is something to decide
Then we reach competition.
ThinkTennessee’s analysis of past state elections found that contested races are a statistically significant predictor of turnout. In midterm elections, contested races were associated with turnout roughly 8.2 percentage points higher.
That is larger than the turnout increase in the college voter-registration experiment.
Which should tell us something.
We can teach citizens everything about an election.
The ballot still has to give them a choice.
That connects this article to the civic ecosystems we have been examining throughout this series.
If someone understands perfectly how County Commission works but only one person is running, civic literacy cannot manufacture electoral competition.
If the decisive election is actually an August primary but almost all civic attention is directed toward November, voters may understand government generally while misunderstanding the moment when their influence is greatest.
You cannot educate your way out of an empty ballot.
The democratic structure has responsibilities too.
Relevance matters because consequences make government visible
Participation can also rise when government stops feeling abstract.
Research on ballot initiatives has found that giving citizens a direct role in deciding policy can increase both political knowledge and the probability of voting, although the effects depend on the electoral context.
That does not mean Tennessee should begin governing everything by referendum.
The mechanism is more useful than the policy prescription.
People pay attention differently when they can see the decision.
A zoning change near their home.
A school-board decision affecting their child.
A transit referendum.
A local tax proposal.
A sheriff’s race.
A question about whether the county should borrow money.
The federal government can feel enormous and distant.
The pothole is outside.
Visible consequences make government easier to understand because the lesson is happening to you.
Good civic journalism should make those connections before the decision is made, not merely explain them afterward.
Community may teach participation differently than a textbook
Then there are the people around us.
Research published in the American Political Science Review found that social networks matter in state and local political participation. People who were socially closer to political candidates and other political elites were more likely to vote.
That does not mean healthy democracy requires knowing politicians personally.
It means participation is social.
People learn that an election exists because somebody mentions it.
A neighbor is running.
A coworker brings it up.
A church announces nonpartisan voter information.
A parent always votes.
A teacher explains registration.
A candidate knocks on the door.
A local reporter writes about what the office actually controls.
Politics becomes visible through other people.
That helps explain why community connection has appeared repeatedly in this series.
Civic knowledge can be taught in a classroom. Civic habit is often taught by watching other people practice it.
Trust may be the wrong word
We should be careful with another popular assumption.
People often say turnout would rise if citizens simply trusted government more.
Research does not show such a clean relationship. Distrust can demobilize people, but it can also motivate them to vote against the people in power. Scholars have long found that political trust and turnout do not move together in a simple one-directional relationship.
A more useful concept may be political efficacy.
In plain language:
Do I understand how to participate?
And do I believe participation has some possibility of affecting the outcome?
Political scientists have repeatedly connected stronger feelings of political efficacy with greater participation, although the causal relationship can run in both directions: people who feel effective may participate, and participating can itself make people feel more effective.
That is different from trusting government.
A citizen can distrust the governor and still believe voting for somebody else matters.
They can distrust County Commission and show up precisely because they want to change it.
Democracy does not require citizens to trust the people holding office.
It needs them to believe they have some meaningful way to hold those people accountable.
Young people offer another clue: having a voice may matter more than hearing a lecture
CIRCLE, the youth civic-engagement research center at Tufts University, found another intriguing relationship in its 2024 research.
Among surveyed young people who strongly remembered having high-school experiences where their voice and opinions mattered, 81% said they were extremely likely to vote in the 2024 election.
Among those who strongly disagreed that they had experienced that kind of student voice, 44% said the same.
That is an association, not proof that giving students more voice causes turnout to jump 37 points.
The distinction matters.
Young people predisposed toward civic participation may also be more likely to seek those experiences.
But CIRCLE found the relationship remained strong even after accounting for several demographic characteristics.
And it points toward a different philosophy of civic education.
Perhaps democracy is not learned only by studying institutions.
Perhaps some of it has to be practiced.
Discuss an issue.
Attend a meeting.
Question an official.
Research a local decision.
Write a public comment.
Register.
Vote in a mock election.
Watch government respond — or fail to respond.
Then study why.
The student stops being merely a person learning about democracy.
They become a person standing somewhere inside it.
That changes what civic literacy should mean
If civic literacy means memorizing government vocabulary, we should be modest about what it can accomplish for turnout.
The evidence does not justify promising that another required civics class will suddenly transform Tennessee participation.
But broaden the definition.
Teach people which government controls which problem.
Teach them when the consequential election occurs.
Teach them how to register and cast a ballot.
Show them what the office actually does.
Give them real candidates to evaluate.
Connect policy to visible local consequences.
Create opportunities for people to practice civic participation before adulthood.
Strengthen the community institutions that keep elections visible between presidential cycles.
Now we are no longer talking only about civic knowledge.
We are building civic capacity.
That is something different.
Maybe the problem is not that Tennesseans know too little
At least not entirely.
Some certainly need more information.
Others may understand the system reasonably well and still see little reason to enter it.
One uncontested race.
A predictable primary.
No local news explaining what is happening.
No candidate asking for their vote.
No community organization discussing the issue.
No clear understanding of what changes if one candidate wins instead of another.
A civics textbook cannot fix all of that.
Neither can a voter-registration drive.
Neither can a competitive election by itself.
The pattern emerging from the research is more complicated.
People appear more likely to participate when several conditions begin meeting one another:
They understand how.
They have a choice.
They recognize what is at stake.
They believe their action has some consequence.
And somebody or something around them reinforces the idea that participation is normal and worthwhile.
That is not a single civic intervention.
It is an ecosystem.
Which brings us back to the question we started with.
Can civic literacy increase participation?
Yes.
But only if we understand literacy broadly enough.
Knowing how government works gives a citizen a map.
Participation begins when the map also shows them where they are — and where they can go.
I am a retired detective and criminal justice / government educator based in Tennessee. I am a commentary writer for Tennessee Lookout and a weekly columnist with Knox TN Today. My work examines public policy, public safety systems and civic responsibility. My reporting and commentary have also appeared in Governing, The Arizona Capitol Times, South Florida Sun Sentinel, Police1, among other state and regional outlets.
