Principle 9: Constituent advocacy must prioritize content and quality over medium and quantity.

by Kathy Goldschmidt on May 23, 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 regularly for new posts outlining the principles and featuring accompanying resources, articles, and plans to support them.

Both Congress and the organizers of grassroots campaigns are stuck with an antiquated and inaccurate belief that the best way to demonstrate broad support for a cause or issue is to send as many emails as possible to as many Members of Congress as possible. Because it is now so much easier and less expensive than in pre-Internet days to generate high volume, these tactics are no longer a clear indication of the salience of an issue. Generating identical form email campaigns to Congress just sap the time, resources, and hard drive space of Congress.

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 ninth principle is: Constituent advocacy must prioritize content and quality over medium and quantity.

Participation in the public policy process is not the same as voting in an election, where the majority rules. It is not the number of messages or the status of the signatories that ultimately matter in the public policy process, but content and merit. Congress has always spent significant time and resources on communications and requests by the People, but with most of it now being mass form email campaigns, the time spent is largely administrative, not substantive.

Our future engagement tactics should facilitate the substantive and minimize the administrative. Fortunately, the same Internet that facilitated grassroots campaigns from associations, nonprofits, and companies can be harnessed to create robust and substantial public engagement. As discussed in our previous report, Coronavirus, Congress, and Constituent Communications, CMF documented how the requirement of remote engagement significantly increased congressional virtual and telephone town hall meetings with tens of thousands of Americans. It will be extremely hard for Congress to shift resources from focusing on the quantity of communications to embracing high-quality engagement, as they are applying mindsets and workflows that have been in place since the 1970s. Yet the benefits of emphasizing quality over quantity are great, and we are confident once politicians get a taste of what genuine, thoughtful, and even civil engagement is like, they will embrace it.

Principle into Practice:

  • Members of Congress should shift staff time and resources currently spent on responding to mass form campaigns to more robust and substantive forms of engagement.
  • Members of Congress should highlight the practices of constituents and organizations that effectively inform and engage with their offices.
  • Advocacy groups should deprioritize sending identical mass email campaigns, opting instead to focus on engagement that better enhances legislators’ understanding of the impact of public policy issues, satisfies and enriches their supporters, and builds trust in our democratic institutions.
Additional Reading
 
citizen engagement, congressional operations