Americans, Congress, and Democratic Responsiveness: Public Evaluations of Congress and Electoral Consequences

8. Conclusion

[ 145 CHAPTER 8 Conclusion We began this book by arguing that the conventional wisdom in political science regularly underestimates both the American public’s political abilities and the responsiveness of Congress to the public. The contribution we most hope to make is to encourage scholars to take a look at the democratic citizenry and institutions in this country in a new and more positive light. Unlike many studies on American government that conclude the system is broken—particularly in relation to the political capabilities of Americans and their Congress—our research provides welcome news. In our story, both Americans and their Congress display the type of responsiveness that a healthy democratic system requires. Americans are interested in and capable of making policy-based judgments of congressional job performance, and those evaluations have real consequences for the future policy performance of Congress. In other words, the public actually listens when its representatives speak, and representatives actually listen when the public speaks. Because our conclusions run counter to much of the standard political science literature, we have taken great pains to demonstrate each step of our argument using the best empirical evidence that we could bring to bear. This evidence has included experimental, cross-sectional, and time series data. Our analyses have taken place at the levels of the individual voter, the congressional district, and the aggregate Congress. While we believe it was necessary to be as comprehensive as possible in testing our hypotheses—as well as the prominent alternatives—we also recognize that this strategy can sometimes distract the reader from the overall story. In the following section, we bring together the key elements of the book to tell the full story about the role congressional evaluations play in 146 ] americans, congress, and democratic responsiveness American politics. We highlight our main findings and how they both rely on and reinforce one another. Then, in the remainder of the chapter, we address three important, further issues. First, we discuss why Congress seems perennially unpopular, given that, as we demonstrate, Congress is responsive to the public’s preferences. Second, we discuss whether our findings represent a temporal change in the relationship between Congress and the public. Third, we talk about the implications of our research for one vital area of governance: institutional reform. We discuss what our findings say about the various types of proposals that scholars and others have offered as ways to make the system more responsive. the role of congressional approval in american politics This book’s story is one of democratic responsibility. Democracy charges elements of society and government with certain tasks to make democracy work as it should. The people in a democracy have the dual responsibilities of civic knowledge and participation. Government representatives and institutions in a democratic system carry the charge of responsiveness to this public. What we have presented in this book, via a step-by-step analysis of this part of the democratic process, is evidence that both sides are, at least to some extent, upholding their end of the democratic bargain . We like to think that the picture this book paints of a working, albeit imperfect, democracy would please E. E. Schattschneider, who excoriated studies that expect too much from democratic citizens rather than looking at and defining democracy in the context of citizens’ limitations (Schattschneider 1960). Americans care about the policy representativeness of their Congress . Existing literature provides evidence that citizens’ policy concerns correlate with their evaluations of Congress, and our survey experiment described in chapter 2 demonstrates that this is in fact a causal relationship . We find that citizens actually can and do react when presented with news about congressional policy action, incorporating this policy information into their evaluations of Congress’s job performance. Our results make clear that the public wants their policy preferences to be represented not only by their own individual members of Congress, as others have shown (e.g., Canes-Wrone, Brady, and Cogan 2002), but also by the collective Congress. To the extent that citizens perceive adequate policy representation on the part of Congress, they are more likely to approve Conclusion [ 147 of how Congress is doing its job. To the extent that they do not, they are more likely to disapprove. Additionally, Americans are able to acquire and retain information about congressional policy actions, even though standard measures of public knowledge suggest they cannot. As we demonstrate in chapter 3, when Congress...