Matthew Levendusky, Director of APPC’s Institutions of Democracy, has been named joint Professor at the Annenberg School for Communication (ASC) and the Department of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. In recognition of this achievement, ASC conducted a Q&A interview with Levendusky. Read about his research below and read the full interview here.
What are some of the research projects you’re working on at this time?
I’m working on three projects right now:
- An analysis of Trump’s rhetoric, focusing on how it primes both concerns about identity and grievance, and how that has shaped contemporary public opinion.
- Unpacking how attitudes toward courts/the judicial system broadly have become polarized and divided. In my earlier work with colleagues from both Political Science and Annenberg, we showed that attitudes toward the Supreme Court polarized post-Dobbs, but this project unpacks why this has occurred more generally.
- Trying to better understand attention at this moment. Working with an interdisciplinary team, I’ve studied the persuasive effects of podcasts, but once I’m further along on the two projects above, I want to unpack how social media has reshaped our attention, and what that means for news and political communication more broadly.
These projects cover a wide range of areas — public opinion and identity, trust in the institutions of our democracy, attention and media — but to me, this is one of the most exciting things about my job: I get to research and study so many fascinating topics.
You’ve helped develop many of APPC’s surveys on Americans’ political knowledge and attitudes toward Congress and government — what are your takeaways from these surveys?
At the Institutions of Democracy, we have both a panel survey of the public (where we’ve interviewed the same set of respondents for several years), and we also run the annual Civics Knowledge survey (timed for Constitution Day). I’ll share one from each that speak to politics at our current moment:
- The public’s trust in the U.S. Supreme Court has collapsed in the last 20 years. In 2005, close to 80 percent of the public had at least a moderate amount of trust in the Court to act in the best interest of the public. In 2025, that fell to 41%, and among Democrats, it dropped to 18 percent. Such low levels of trust are a real alarm bell for the institution — something we’ve seen reflected in Chief Justice Roberts’ year-end report on the court system.
- The public, even Republicans, continues to support our system of checks and balances. In general, the public is not supportive of the president having carte blanche power, despite what some have claimed.
As a scholar, one of my most important roles is to accurately document what the public believes at any point in the time, both to advance our scholarly understanding, but to also be able to provide journalists and others with the ability to hold politicians to account.
Read more of this interview at the Annenberg School for Communication.
