Unpacking the Black Box of Congressional Representation

• In Event: Congressional Staff, Constituent Representation, and Legislative Behavior

Abstract

How do members of Congress learn their constituents’ policy preferences and priorities? Why do they respond more to some constituents than others? Research to date on representation in Congress typically draws a black box around the processes through which members gauge constituent opinion. However, a long research tradition has shown that representatives and their staff tend to be imperfectly informed about their constituents’ views. To understand this information shortfall and why Congress responds to some Americans’ preferences more than others, we must open up this black box. Several scholars have offered insight into the kinds of constituents that representatives see when they perceive their constituencies. This scholarship calls for systematic description and theorizing about the processes intervening between constituents’ preference formation and legislators’ policy decisions.
To provide a comprehensive explanation of how members of Congress learn what their constituents want, we conceptualize the legislator as an “enterprise,” considering the integral roles played by staff. In August of 2016, we e-mailed a survey to all senior congressional staff—including chiefs of staff, deputy chiefs of staff, legislative directors, and senior policy advisors—yielding a sample of 101 staff from 91 offices. We also used a combination of purposive, network, and random sampling techniques to recruit a sample of 18 senior congressional aides for semi-structured interviews, which we conducted from August to October 2017.
We argue that, guided by the electoral incentive, congressional offices seek to understand the policy preferences and priorities of the constituents whose votes, volunteer labor, and donations they hope to secure for the next election. Therefore, they use methods of gauging constituent opinion, such as aggregating constituent correspondence, that focus on politically active constituents rather than the median constituent. Further, congressional staff rely on trusted interest group representatives for information about the opinions of subconstituencies with a stake in a given policy area. Staff then convey constituent opinion information to members of Congress as part of regular meetings and advice on votes and co-sponsorships. As political activists and interest groups tend to be wealthier and more ideologically extreme than the median voter, congressional offices’ methods of measuring constituent opinion may help explain why Congress is more polarized than the public and responds predominantly to the wealthy.

Authors

• Geoffrey Lancaster Henderson, University of California, Santa Barbara

• Alexander Warren Hertel-Fernandez, Columbia University

• Matto Mildenberger, University of California Santa Barbara

• Leah Stokes, UCSB