An Un-Representative Congress

From "The Trouble With Elections: Everything We Thought We Knew About Democracy is Wrong," Chapter 2.5

Elected representatives do not only have a heightened level of polarization compared to the average citizen. They are unlike Americans across a vast array of demographic, ideological, and even psychological dimensions.

As we will examine in later chapters, there is a common sense view that a representative body should be like the population represented. John Adams, who would later become the second President of the United States, composed an essay in 1776 entitled Thoughts on Government. He wrote that a legislature “should be in miniature an exact portrait of the  people at large. It should think, feel, reason and act like them.” The famous proposition of equality expressed as a set of prepositions in Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, – “government of the people, by the people, for the people” – encapsulates the true spirit of democracy.¹

Political scientists describe a demographic match between the legislature and the population as being “descriptively representative.” Elected members of Congress, as a whole, are quite unlike the population, and hardly an “exact portrait of the people at large.”  A 2011 analysis by the Washington Post found that over a 25-year period the inflation-adjusted median net worth of Americans declined slightly, while the median net worth of members of the House of Representatives increased by 259 percent. According to an analysis by the Center for Responsive Politics, by 2012 a majority of the members of Congress were millionaires. The median wealth of Democratic and Republican members of Congress is virtually identical, though seven out of the ten richest members of Congress in 2014 were Democrats. Nicholas Carnes of Duke University examined the class background of members of Congress during the twentieth century and the impact on voting behavior. He concluded:

“One of the defining features of America’s political system is that men and women from the working class seldom occupy important political offices. If legislators’ class backgrounds shape their political outlooks in some systematic way, the numerical under-representation of working-class Americans could have dramatic effects on who wins and who loses in the policy making process. The evidence presented in this paper suggests that this is the case.”

In 2023, women still made up only about 29 percent of the House and 25 percent of the Senate (the most ever). The percentage of African-Americans in the Senate has peaked at 3 percent. The U.S. House of Representatives also under-represents most minorities (other than rich white males, who are over-represented by a huge factor), though less extremely than the Senate, due to gerrymandered “majority-minority” de facto racial districts. Members of Congress come overwhelmingly from law, business and finance backgrounds. Congress is a strikingly homogeneous group, compared to the diversity of the people they purportedly represent. As Peter Stone wrote in the introduction to the new re-release of Callenbach and Phillips’s book, A Citizens Legislature, “Congressional elections, notoriously, are marvelously good at electing wealthy white men, mostly lawyers, and not very good at electing anyone else.”

Some might argue I am making too much of descriptive unrepresentativeness. Whether selecting a dentist, or lawyer for yourself – or a politician – you want a skilled agent who will work on your behalf, regardless of demographic traits. But there is no evidence that elections reliably pick uniquely skilled agents working on our behalf. Psychologist Steve Taylor of Leeds Beckett University notes that:

“There’s a great deal of research showing that people with negative personality traits, such as narcissism, ruthlessness, amorality or a lack of empathy and conscience, are attracted to high-status roles, including politics. In a representative democracy, therefore, the people who put themselves forward as representatives include a sizeable proportion of people with disordered personalities – people who crave power because of their malevolent traits. And the most disordered and malevolent personalities –the most ruthless and amoral – tend to rise to the highest positions in any political party, and in any government.”

Political scientist Kevin O’Leary argues in his book Saving Democracy: A Plan for Real Representation In America, that elected representatives, at least on a national level, and in the larger states, constitute a breed apart – a virtual elected royalty, complete with fawning personal staffs:

“Within their world, legislators are the center of attention, the star attraction, the king or queen of their domain. It is not so much that national legislators are economically and socially part of the upper strata – though many are, given the cost of winning a seat in Congress. What is more important is the psychological distance that gradually grows between them and their constituents. True, successful politicians develop what Richard Fenno calls a “home style” for dealing with constituents back in the district. But this technique masks the psychological distance that naturally grows when elected officials take up residence in Washington, DC or the state capitol and become players in the capitol scene.”

Just as members of Congress become alienated from their constituents, constituents become alienated from Congress. This branch of American government suffers from abysmally low approval ratings, occasionally dipping into the single-digit percentages. When Americans are asked about their confidence in various institutions, Congress often ranks at the absolute bottom, below every other institution listed by the pollsters. Interestingly, the distrust is mutual. The Pew Center conducted a survey of members of Congress in 1998. When asked “Do Americans know enough about issues to form wise opinions about what should be done?” just 31 percent of members of Congress responding answered “yes.” This distrust of American decision-making ability is even more extreme at the level of local government. A survey of elected and appointed local officials conducted by researchers at The Center for Local, State, and Urban Policy at the University of Michigan found that while 64 percent of Michigan officials said that people should be encouraged to give input: 

“Few [of the legislators surveyed] see deeper roles for citizens, whether by identifying policy options from which officials would choose (7 percent), by recommending specific policy choices (9 percent), or actually making decisions on behalf of the local government (1 percent).”  

It seems likely that this has a lot to do with an assessment of public ignorance, rather than inherent incompetence. Politicians primarily come in contact with citizens who either have not studied the issues, or are motivated activists with extreme views. I will dig into the issue of public ignorance in subsequent chapters, showing how citizens’ assemblies have repeatedly overcome that default problem.

As a general rule, Americans do not think Congress cares about the people, or is responsive to them. A 2013 Rasmussen poll found that just 16 percent of likely voters believed most members of Congress cared what their constituents thought. This likely overstates the level of public confidence, since non-voters were not included in the survey, and they may have an even more negative view. Yet efforts by political scientists to quantify how responsive elected legislatures are to the population by comparing public opinion survey data to legislative action have found some correlation — that is, legislatures are more likely to pass laws that most people favor, than laws that most people oppose. However, correlation does not indicate causation. These studies could only examine the coherence of public opinion and legislative action on those few issues that were raised to a sufficient level of prominence that they made it onto polling organization’s surveys. The countless “under the radar” issues that legislatures deal with couldn’t be analyzed through such studies. 

Martin Gilens examined the same polling data, and found that this apparent responsiveness masks, rather than reveals, the full story. Gilens compared the “responsiveness” of Congress to policy preferences of high-income people (top 10 percent), with Congress’s “responsiveness” to the preferences of the poor (bottom 10 percent), specifically for those policies where the wealthy and poor had significantly different preferences. He found a fairly strong correlation between Congressional action with the top income preferences, but a “complete lack of responsiveness to the policy preferences of the poor.” Of course, the poor may have different preferences than most people, so he then compared Congressional “responsiveness” to the wealthy with “responsiveness” to middle-income people. Gilens found that “median income Americans fare little better than the poor when their policy preferences diverge from those of the well-off.” I put the word “responsiveness” in quotes above because this research didn’t establish whether the correlation between Congressional action and the policy preferences of the wealthy is the result of Congress responding to the wealthy (perhaps due to campaign contributions), or merely reflects the fact that nearly all members of Congress are themselves in the top 10 percent, and naturally share the preferences of their economic class. 

There is also a common opinion in the U.S. that many, or even most, elected officials are corrupt, or are at least looking out for “special interests” rather than the general public. Over the past decades, the Rasmussen polls have found that typically 12 percent of respondents thought members of Congress were sincerely interested in helping people, while 76 percent said members of Congress were more interested in their own careers. The popular rating of the job Congress is doing peaked in 2023 when just over one fourth of respondents said it was good or excellent. However, typically around 40 percent said that most members of Congress (not just a few bad apples) were corrupt and only one third disagreed with this view. These attitudes are hardly new. Since 1952, the University of Michigan’s Center for Political Studies has conducted an opinion survey of the American public every two years. One of their standard questions has been “Would you say the government is pretty much run by a few big interests looking out for themselves or that it is run for the benefit of all the people?” Substantial majorities (often more than two thirds) believe government is run by “a few big interests.” For decades this has been the finding in every survey, except the one conducted following the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, when 48 percent held this negative view. As Professor John Gastil wrote in the introduction to his book By Popular Demand: 

“There are two fundamental problems in American politics. The first is that most Americans do not believe that elected officials represent their interests. The second is that they are correct.”  

While distrust of elected politicians is particularly rampant in the United States, it is not a uniquely American complaint. In a March 2014 article entitled “What’s gone wrong with democracy?” the British magazine The Economist reported that “A survey of seven European countries in 2012 found that more than half of voters ‘had no trust in government’ whatsoever.”

The old adage that we “get the government we deserve'' is a blame-the-victim rationalization that disguises the inherent failings of our electoral system. Our elected representative bodies are extremely un-representative. It is stunning just how unlike the American people Congress is. Though Adams’s 1776 definition of “the people '' did not include women, indigenous people, slaves or non-property-owning white men, this likeness principle of representation is compelling. Yet despite some progress, after more than 230 years working-class people, women, racial minorities – indeed as I stated above, almost all demographic groups other than old, wealthy, white men – are dramatically under-represented in our legislatures.

1. Lincoln did not coin this phrase. Variants of this phrase had been used by many orators, including abolitionist preacher Theodore Parker in the 1850s. Although it long pre-dates the Gettysburg Address, it is almost universally associated with Lincoln.