Civics

Empowering refugees through education

The student-led group Penn for Refugee Empowerment offers tutoring and helps refugee-resettlement organizations with after-school programming, child care, home setup, and event assistance.

Kristen de Groot

Public media can improve our ‘flawed’ democracy

A new study finds that countries with well-funded public media have healthier democracies, and explains why investment in U.S. public media is an investment in the future of journalism and democracy alike.

Alina Ladyzhensky

2020 voting report: By the numbers

Penn students voted in unprecedented numbers during the 2020 presidential election, in part due to the voter-engagement program Penn Leads the Vote, which recently won the 2021 ALL IN Democracy Challenge Best Action Plan Award.

Kristina García



In the News


NBC News

NBC News exit poll on Super Tuesday: Our methodology

Stephanie Perry and Elizabeth Schreier of the Penn Program on Opinion Research and Election Studies and Joelle Gross of the School of Arts & Sciences share their methodology for the NBC News Super Tuesday exit polls.

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Las Vegas Review-Journal

Ranked ‘avoid’: Ranked choice voting increases ballot errors

A study from Penn found that votes in ranked-choice races are nearly 10 times more likely to be rejected due to an improper mark than votes in non-ranked choice races.

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Philadelphia Inquirer

Sandra Day O’Connor and the promise of civic education

Jonathan Zimmerman of the Graduate School of Education writes that teaching schoolchildren about the rights and responsibilities of citizenship might be the only way to heal our polarized society.

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Axios

Jill Biden helps debut modern version of “Schoolhouse Rock”

A 2022 survey from the Annenberg Public Policy Center found that less than half of U.S. adults could name all three branches of government.

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C-SPAN

Kathleen Hall Jamieson on civics education and bridging political divides

Kathleen Hall Jamieson of the Annenberg Public Policy Center discusses the importance of civics education as a tool to bridge political divides.

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Knews Media

Journalism is a public good and should be publicly funded

Victor Pickard of the Annenberg School for Communication explains that the “positive” interpretation of the First Amendment focuses on government’s affirmative role to help guarantee the public access to a “diverse and informative media system.”

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