TERRE HAUTE — Quick question, Hoosiers: what are the four biggest areas of spending by Congress?

Food stamps? Education? No, actually the largest financial commitments made by Congress are Social Security (21 percent of total congressional spending), national defense (18 percent), Medicare (12 percent), and interest payments on the national debt (9 percent).

A couple of follow-up questions: How long is the term served by a member of the Indiana Senate? How long is a U.S. senator’s term? The answers: a state senator’s term lasts four years, while a U.S. senator’s term continues for six years.

Those queries aren’t meant to give you a Sunday-morning headache, or to wound anyone’s self-esteem. The point is that the structure and function of government can seem complex to average folks, and the myriad roles performed by a county council, a state representative, a member of Congress or the president of the United States are frequently — and understandably — misunderstood.

Many of us like to complain about government’s failures, misguided actions or invasions into our lives, but how many of us really understand how, for example, the Vigo County Public Library is funded?

The lack of knowledge about how government works (or doesn’t work) was exemplified in a national survey conducted three years ago. In that poll, only 1 in 3 Americans could name all three branches of government. (For those scoring at home, they are the executive, legislative and judicial.)

There is no downside to improving our civic knowledge, and Indiana is blessed to have, living on Hoosier soil, one of America’s foremost statesmen and governmental scholars — former U.S. Rep. Lee Hamilton. The 80-year-old served in Congress from 1965 to 1999. Since retiring from Capitol Hill, he’s been the bipartisan go-to guy to lead federal investigations of the Iraq war and the 9/11 terrorist attacks. He worked as president and director of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C., and is currently the director of the Center on Congress at IU.

Dignified, grandfatherly and reasonable, Hamilton can explain the functions of government as accurately as anyone. Not surprisingly, he’s curious to find out how much people in his home state know about how their government works. Last week, Hamilton kicked off a project to assess the “civic health” of Hoosiers. He and the staff of the National Conference on Citizenship will spend the next five months studying the civic involvement of people in Indiana. They plan to find out, among other things, how often Hoosiers vote and volunteer, and why. The result will be the Indiana Civic Health Index.

In announcing the project, Hamilton issued a challenge: “We like to say we’re a great state. Let’s see how great we are.”

The study could reveal astonishing levels of displeasure in, or ignorance of, government. Fifteen other states already have taken on the project, which uses public data, such as U.S. Census Bureau findings. In Illinois’ case, just 15 percent of folks in the Land of Lincoln polled two years ago believed their state government “did the right thing” most of the time. (Actually, 15 percent could be considered surprisingly high, given that Gov. Rod Blagojevich had been arrested on federal corruption charges, impeached and removed from office in 2009.)

Hamilton sees evidence that Americans know less and care less about their government. If true, that sad situation endangers democracy, he said. He’s right, and the organizers of the Indiana Civic Health Index project — which also include the Indiana Supreme Court and its chief justice, Randall T. Shepard, the Indiana Bar Foundation, Indiana University Northwest and the Hoosier State Press Association — deserve thanks for digging into the problem.

It’s easy to laugh off a disinterest in government as a minor quirk of busy American life. Such a disconnection can have consequences, though. As Hamilton pointed out in an essay written in November 2003, 69 percent of Americans that year believed Iraq dictator Saddam Hussein had close ties to the Sept. 11 terrorists. No such evidence was found.

“You can pass this off as simple confusion, or the result of misleading statements by those with a vested interest in pursuing the war, but it’s nothing to be shrugged away,” Hamilton wrote. “In a democracy, public misperceptions carry an enormous cost.”