Many people suspect that long-serving members of Congress lose touch with their constituents after gaining power and influence in Washington, DC. But new research from Ford School assistant professor Devin Judge-Lord shows that as legislators gain experience and institutional power, they maintain, and often increase, their capacity to provide constituent services.
To understand what drives constituent service provision, Judge-Lord and his colleagues, Eleanor Neff Powell (University of Wisconsin–Madison) and Justin Grimmer (Stanford University), analyzed congressional correspondence. The researchers submitted more than 400 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for the time period between 2007 and 2020. As a result, Judge-Lord and his colleagues assembled a massive dataset and hand-coded more than 511,000 records to reveal modern legislator behavior. They found that over 80% of the communications were contacts on behalf of constituents.
The researchers found that while more experienced, long-serving legislators do more policy work (such as crafting legislation, commenting on proposed agency rules, and addressing broad, systemic issues) than their less experienced peers, they also do more constituent work (i.e., contacting the IRS to address constituent tax issues or the VA for veterans' benefits).
"Potomac fever," the idea that over time, legislators shift away from providing constituent services, is often cited as a reason to impose congressional term limits. However, Judge-Lord's research suggests term limits may reduce constituent services, since new legislators engage in less constituent service work than their more experienced counterparts, who often take on leadership roles and have more staff assistance.
"Rather than long-serving and powerful elected officials diverting attention from constituents, their increased capacity enables them to maintain levels of constituency service, even as they prioritize policy work," the authors note. "Removing experienced legislators would likely decrease levels of constituency service."
The research also provides strong evidence that increasing legislator capacity, particularly through additional staffing, supports higher levels of constituent service.
"Because increased staff for committee chairs is a likely mechanism for the capacity effects we find, our results offer a key outcome measure and effect sizes that may correspond to additional staff," said the authors. "While committee chairs simultaneously obtain other forms of power (like agenda control), to the extent that our results reflect the capacity boost of committee staff, our evidence suggests that congressional staff likely have measurable and potentially large effects on the volume of work legislators can do."
Read Judge-Lord's full paper published in the American Journal of Political Science here.
See the full dataset on legislator requests on the Harvard Dataverse here.
