K262, CGIS Knafel Building, 1737 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA 02138
Seeing Like a Congressional Office: Evidence from Constituent Contact
You’re invited to join us for the CAPS Seminar with Leah Stokes, for her presentation, “Seeing Like a Congressional Office: Evidence from Constituent Contact.”
The talk will be followed by light refreshments.
Abstract
Citizens directly communicating their views to their elected representatives is a key mechanism for democratic responsiveness to the public. Longstanding research also suggests that biases in who contacts elected officials can undermine accurate representation of the public’s interests. However, who contacts elected officials and what views they express remain unclear. We present an unprecedented window into which constituents contact their representatives, and what policies they focus on based on a collaboration with a constituent relationship management (CRM) vendor to the U.S. House of Representatives. We analyze over 1.6 million administrative records of constituent contacts from over a dozen Congressional offices over four years (2019-2022), matched to an original survey of 14,096 voters with an oversample of those who contacted Congress. Our analysis confirms expected demographic biases in who contacts Congress, but in contrast to recent work finds that both strong liberals and conservatives are similarly likely to contact Congress. We also document a strong relationship between: (a) which issues constituents care about and which issues Congress hears about; and, (b) voter issue preferences on issues and the views Congress hears on those issues. Nevertheless, we document that individual issues often markedly deviate from this pattern. Compared to the typical voter in a district, Congress hears more from opponents of changes to the status quo and about issues closely following “focusing events” driven by the media, ongoing social, economic, and political developments, and prior government action–what we dub a reaction bias. This leaves supporters of changes to the status quo and citizens who care about orphan issues that lack “focusing events” or strong organizational mobilization underrepresented in communication to Congress.
About the Speaker
Leah Stokes is the 2023-24 Jeffrey S. and Margaret Mais Padnos Fellow at Harvard Radcliffe Institute, and Anton Vonk Associate Professor of Environmental Politics in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She works on energy, climate, and environmental policy. Her award-winning book Short Circuiting Policy: Interest Groups and the Battle over Clean Energy and Climate Policy in the American States (Oxford University Press, 2020) examines why we are behind on climate action, telling the history of fossil fuel companies and electric utilities promoting climate denial and delay.
At Radcliffe, Stokes is writing a book documenting how climate policy rose to the top of the agenda, became a priority in Congress, and eventually became law through the Inflation Reduction Act. This project will use ethnography and interviews with leading organizers and policymakers.
Stokes holds a doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in public policy and additional degrees from Columbia University and the University of Toronto. She has been published in top scholarly journals as well as in the Atlantic, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and elsewhere. Stokes was named to the 2022 TIME100 Next list. She is a senior policy consultant at Rewiring America and cohost of the popular climate podcast A Matter of Degrees.
About the Seminar
The CAPS Seminar is a monthly series highlighting research by CAPS affiliates and fostering discussion among members of our community.