Principle 3: Congress Must Robustly Collect, Aggregate, and Analyze Meaningful Knowledge from Diverse Sources

by Kathy Goldschmidt on March 11, 2022

This is part of a series from our latest report, The Future of Citizen Engagement: Rebuilding the Democratic Dialogue. Over the next few weeks, check back for new posts outlining the principles and featuring accompanying resources, articles, and plans to support them.

Many assume that, outside of elections, public opinion polls, popular protest, and prolific advocacy campaigns should dictate the policy decisions Senators and Representatives make. We are a government of, by, and for the People—the logic goes—so Congress should do what the majority of the People want. The reality is more complicated than that, but the disconnect between popular opinion, media coverage, and congressional action inspires both anger and apathy. People feel Congress is not listening.
In our 2021 report The Future of Citizen Engagement: Rebuilding the Democratic Dialogue, we propose ten principles for modernizing and improving the relationship between Congress and the People. All ten will require changes in the constituent engagement culture and practices in both Congress and the organizations that help facilitate grassroots advocacy. The third principle is: Congress must robustly collect, aggregate, and analyze meaningful knowledge from diverse sources.

The founding vision was that, because Congress and its members have access to more information than the average individual, they should use that information to make wise decisions on behalf of their constituents and the country. Senators and Representatives also have a duty to deliberate, collaborate, and compromise as they seek public policy solutions to pressing problems throughout the country. They need to listen to and learn from diverse sources, including one another, to work through and agree on the laws that will govern all U.S. residents. The idea is that, though no one gets everything they want, we generally get what we collectively, as a society, need.

When the First Amendment was being considered by Congress, the right to petition government for a redress of grievances was so well-understood that the only debate about it was whether the People had the right to “petition” or the right to “instruct.” A petition is a plea or request akin to a court filing, where there is an expectation for due process and response, but not that a petitioner’s request be granted. Senators and Representatives were expected to apply their own knowledge and judgment and decide for themselves where they stood on the request, just as judges and juries do in court. Instruction, on the other hand, would have left Senators and Representatives with no discretion. They would have had to act as instructed by their state legislatures. The first Congress decided that petition, not instruction, should be enshrined in the Bill of Rights.

Now, however, technology has muddied the distinction between petition and instruction. Constituent expectation, technological infrastructure for citizen advocacy, and common practice are currently being built around majoritarian concepts more akin to instruction or direct democracy than petition. Modern conventional wisdom is that the more people who contact Congress about an issue or bill—the more pressure applied—the more likely Senators and Representatives should be to act according to the views expressed.

This puts undue pressure on democracy by trying to turn Congress into something it is not. Congress does not have the rules, culture, resources, or infrastructure to facilitate and support direct democracy or instruction. To move to a direct democracy would require not only amending the Constitution, but also a complete reorganization of Congress and our national democratic infrastructure. In the meantime, we are in a limbo where public practice and expectation is completely out of alignment with congressional practice and procedure.

In actual practice, Members use their own judgement, which is informed—but not dictated—by input from:
  • Stakeholders. These are the people and organizations most impacted by an issue or legislation. Often—but not always—they are organized and represented by an association, corporation, nonprofit, or other organization. That organization will proactively reach out to Senators and Representatives—often via a lobbyist—to express their collective views. The government, civil society, and private sector officials who represent impacted people are stakeholders, as well. Stakeholders also often include people who are directly impacted, but not organized or engaged, and it is these people whose views and engagement must be specifically sought by Congress to ensure they are represented in the public policy process.
  • Individuals. In most public policy processes, there are people involved who care deeply about an issue or the impact of legislation, but who are not necessarily directly impacted by it, as stakeholders are. Sometimes they are members of organizations that generate grassroots advocacy campaigns to Congress and sometimes they engage independently. They convey their views in many different ways, from in-person meetings to phone calls, protest, and social media, and especially through email. Contacts generated by grassroots advocacy campaigns are currently the most abundant source of engagement with Congress. The challenge congressional offices have with these messages is extracting the meaning from the abundance of messages and incorporating it into public policy in substantive ways.
  • Data. There is no shortage of data available to Congress. It is produced by government, academia, and the private sector and delivered to Senators and Representatives in a multitude of venues and formats. The input from stakeholders, individuals, and experts is also data. The challenge Congress faces is processing data into knowledge it can wisely use to identify solutions to public policy problems. Legislative branch agencies, such as the Congressional Research Service (CRS), Congressional Budget Office (CBO), Government Accountability Office (GAO), and others help Congress collect, analyze, and understand the vast amount of data.
  • Experts. Congress has a multitude of internal experts in the form of committee staff and analysts in CRS, CBO, and GAO. Congress also relies on external experts in the form of lobbyists, Executive Branch employees, academics, and representatives from civil society organizations and think tanks. Experts are called on to advise individual Senators and Representatives and their staffers, and they also appear as witnesses at committee and subcommittee hearings. The risk of Congress relying on external resources, however, is that biases can skew experts’ analysis—both intentionally and unintentionally—so Congress can be misinformed when it is not relying on trusted internal expertise developed for its own legislative purposes. Expertise within the Legislative Branch must be comparable to external sources to ensure Congress is not unduly influenced by biased experts.
This framework for thinking about how Congress and its members listen and learn to inform deliberation and public policy was proposed by the technology and innovation subcommittee of the American Political Science Association’s (APSA) Task Force on Congressional Reform. Understanding that Senators and Representatives have a duty to consider information from a wide range of sources and then deliberate together—sometimes extensively and contentiously—before settling on public policy solutions helps explain why they do not just let public opinion polls, mass protest, or advocacy campaigns dictate their actions.

Given the pressure modern communications technologies, a 24-hour news cycle, an ever-increasing population, and a constant flow of data now place on Congress—as well as the significant imbalance of funding and staffing between the legislative and executive branches of government—there are now significant concerns about Congress’ ability to effectively integrate the needs and views of the People into public policy.

Public policy has always been informed by a range of relevant information sources, including Members’ own experiences and beliefs. New systems and platforms meant to facilitate and enhance congressional engagement with the public should support robust aggregation and disaggregation, parsing, and analysis of relevant information from a wide range of sources. Only in this way can Congress turn the vast amount of available data and information into knowledge that effectively informs public policy and provides our leaders with the wisdom they need to determine the best course of action.

Principle into Practice:
  • Congress should adopt processes, systems, and technologies to better aggregate and understand the People’s views and integrate them with other sources of data and information.
  • Members of Congress should consider regularly partnering with local colleges, community colleges, and universities to help more broadly collect, aggregate, and understand constituent views and needs.
  • Members of Congress should convene local subject matter experts for roundtable discussions on relevant issues and legislation.
  •  Advocacy groups should strive to educate and train their supporters to be better citizen-advocates, providing a high quality of content to their elected officials.
Additional Resources
 
citizen engagement, congressional operations