This is the fourth in a series of weekly blog posts summarizing the findings in our latest report "What Americans Want from Congress & How Members Can Build Trust."

From 2015-2020, CMF collaborated with the Program for Public Consultation at the University of Maryland to ask national samples of registered voters about their interactions with their elected representatives in Congress. We wanted to gain a better understanding of what voters want and expect and what would improve their trust in Congress. One of the key findings from the surveys was that there are many ways Senators and Representatives can convey accountability to constituents, and face to face meetings is just one of them.

The fact that voters would support Members' decisions when they are confident Members are acting on what they thought best – not on outside influence – raised questions for us about how to build that confidence. We tried to better understand how Senators and Representatives can convey accountability to their constituents. We asked about a number of activities, some of which many Members already do, others of which were experimental ideas we wanted to test.

The respondents felt that it would help Senators and Representatives a lot to be more accountable to their constituents by including on their websites how they voted on major issues and why. As the following figure shows, almost all of the registered voters thought Members' explanations for their votes on important issues would help them be more accountable, and almost three-quarters of them thought it would help Senators' and Representatives' accountability "a lot." The numbers were similar for providing on their websites how they voted on major issues, with 91% of the respondents saying it would help them be more accountable, and 70% saying it would help them "a lot."

Another website activity we offered also had fairly strong backing by the respondents: providing transparency in their donors. Almost two-thirds (62%) of the voters felt publishing donors on their websites would help Members "a lot" to be more accountable to their constituents.

As the figure below shows, other activities also had strong backing, with some differences in the strength of respondents’ opinions. More than half said it would help “a lot” to be more accountable to constituents if Members would: make a formal commitment to engage constituents (58%); engage constituents in informed policy surveys (51%); and conduct in-person town halls to listen to constituents (51%). The activity that fell far below the rest was conducting telephone town hall meetings to listen to constituents. Though the 29% of respondents who felt this would help Members be more accountable to their constituents “a lot” seems low in comparison to the strength of the other options, having more than one-quarter express strong sentiment is still significant.

We suspect voters’ opinions of in-person and telephone town hall meetings have been changed by COVID-19 since we collected this data. Senators and Representatives across the country have relied heavily on telephone and online town hall meetings to communicate with their constituents during the pandemic and became more open to virtual meetings. Just as Congress has become more comfortable with them, we suspect voters have, as well.

Hanzell Carrillo is a senior at Nazareth College majoring in Political Science. He is CMF's Research Assistant intern for Spring 2021.