What We Learned in 2019
Dr. Michael Neblo briefs a bipartisan group of House and Senate staff about deliberative constituent engagement in Sen. Rob Portman’s office.
What our newest collaborations with congressional offices tell us about the prospects for digital constituent engagement
In January of 2019, the 116th Congress was just being sworn in, and Connecting to Congress was also getting ready to begin a new term of sorts— moving from years of scientific analysis back into the field, re-launching a groundbreaking set of experiments on how to rebuild the trust between constituents and Congress and strengthen the institution’s legitimacy. Now, as 2019 comes to a close, we reflect on what we’ve learned during this fast-paced year.
Why did we decide to re-launch the Connecting to Congress initiative?
The Connecting to Congress team believes that legitimacy and trust comes from authentic engagement and accountability – and they have evidence to back that up. Our previous research demonstrated that deliberative constituent engagement—substantive, structured conversation between Members and a representative sample of their constituents— produced increased trust between citizens and their Member, as well as a number of other positive outcomes. But we’d also learned from our previous research that congressional offices simply don’t have the capacity or the positioning to be able to do this kind of constituent engagement on their own— just the task of convening a representative cross-section of constituents is difficult and time-consuming, and made even more so due to the broad skepticism among citizens that their representatives would organize a truly impartial deliberation with constituents.
This is where Connecting to Congress decided there was an opportunity to make a difference. Our previous research allowed us to develop evidence-based practices for convening and facilitating these kinds of public deliberations, and our status as an independent, non-partisan research initiative allowed us to reach representative samples of districts. So we began talking to a wide group of congressional offices: Members we had worked with before, just- elected Members fresh off the campaign trail, and others recommended to us by partners such as the Congressional Management Foundation. We got input about the issues where offices didn’t have a lot of information on their constituents’ views. We got feedback on time constraints and other concerns. And, gratifyingly, we got a lot of interest in participating in these new deliberative engagement experiences. We’d hoped to make our plans as risk-free and easy-to-adopt as possible— the events are free for the office, our team handles all the work, and all we want to know is what impact the experiments have. That so many offices were willing to meet with us boosted our confidence that we were offering something of real value.
What did we learn?
Over the course of the year, we met with more than 40 House and Senate offices, and conducted five deliberative engagement events for four offices, Rep. Mark Takano (CA-41), Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon (PA-5), Rep. Dan Crenshaw (TX-2), and Rep. Donna Shalala (FL-27). Here’s what we learned:
We wondered if the increased polarization since the previous experiments would produce less civil, less productive conversations and thus potentially, lower amounts of trust and the like for both offices and constituents. We were pleased to see this was not the case.
On average, Representatives’ approval rating among participants in the sessions increased by 41% (from 58% to 82%) across the sessions.
On average, Representatives’ trust rating among participants increased after the session by 9%.
Across the sessions, participants were 24% more likely to say that they would definitely or probably vote for their Representative after the session, and 18% less likely to say they definitely or probably would not.
Participant satisfaction with the events and interest in doing another remained above 80%.
In our earlier round of 20+ online townhalls, in over 1400 comments and questions, astonishingly, we never had to flag/discard a single comment or question for being inciting, vulgar or abusive. Despite the increased hostility that has often erupted at in-person townhalls since 2006-07, our record still stands at exactly 0 such comments. The deliberative structure of the events and the representative sample of participants combined to produce high-quality, civil conversations every time.
What next?
Based on what we’ve learned this year, we feel ready to really ramp up our efforts in 2020. Though impeachment and the upcoming election create some interesting challenges to work around, we hope to work with at least ten more Congressional offices from both parties from all over the country on issues such as AI, automation and the future of work, internet governance, workforce development, the opioid epidemic and healthcare. As we conduct these experiments, we’ll be continually gathering feedback from both constituents and congressional staff about how we can make them even more useful to both. Our goal is to gather hard evidence on the best technology and practices for deliberative constituent engagement, rigorously analyze it, and then use what we’ve learned to support any Member of Congress who wants it. We think— and hope to prove— that this work can relieve some of the cynicism about democratic institutions, strengthen our common bonds, and ultimately improve representative democracy. We believe this work has never been more needed than now.