Representation on the Periphery: On Non-Voting Members of Congress

• In Event: Achieving Representation in Electoral Democracies

Abstract

Non-voting representatives (serving from Puerto Rico, the American Samoa, the District of Columbia, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, and the U.S. Virgin Islands) inhabit a peripheral space within the U.S. Congress. House rules bar them from voting on the House floor; their authority derives not from the Constitution but from statue, and the office they hold can be revoked at the whims of Congress. Non-voting representatives also inhabit a peripheral space within the study of Congress: they remain nearly absent from sustained empirical examination.

This paper aims to correct that omission. Although they lack the core legislative function—the ability to vote—I argue that non-voting representatives have exercised informal power in creative ways, and in turn, offered novel examples of representation which challenge structures of American territorial and racial hegemony. Drawing on accounts from American political development and Congressional history, along with legislative history and extensive archival research from the papers of former non-voting members of Congress themselves, my project offers a novel account of how non-voting members of Congress have, even without formal voting privileges, contested and subverted American political institutions.

Author

• Elliot Mamet, Duke University