Why is representation in congress important

A representative who sees him- or herself as a delegate believes he or she is empowered merely to enact the wishes of constituents. Delegates must employ some means to identify the views of their constituents and then vote accordingly. They are not permitted the liberty of employing their own reason and judgment while acting as representatives in Congress.

This is the delegate model of representation. Understandably, few if any representatives adhere strictly to one model or the other. Instead, most find themselves attempting to balance the important principles embedded in each. Political scientists call this the politico model of representation. In it, members of Congress act as either trustee or delegate based on rational political calculations about who is best served, the constituency or the nation.

For example, every representative, regardless of party or conservative versus liberal leanings, must remain firm in support of some ideologies and resistant to others. For votes related to such issues, representatives will likely pursue a delegate approach. For other issues, especially complex questions the public at large has little patience for, such as subtle economic reforms, representatives will tend to follow a trustee approach.

This is not to say their decisions on these issues run contrary to public opinion. Rather, it merely means they are not acutely aware of or cannot adequately measure the extent to which their constituents support or reject the proposals at hand. It could also mean that the issue is not salient to their constituents. Congress works on hundreds of different issues each year, and constituents are likely not aware of the particulars of most of them.

In some cases, representation can seem to have very little to do with the substantive issues representatives in Congress tend to debate. Instead, proper representation for some is rooted in the racial, ethnic, socioeconomic, gender, and sexual identity of the representatives themselves.

This form of representation is called descriptive representation. At one time, there was relatively little concern about descriptive representation in Congress. A major reason is that until well into the twentieth century, white men of European background constituted an overwhelming majority of the voting population.

African Americans were routinely deprived of the opportunity to participate in democracy, and Hispanics and other minority groups were fairly insignificant in number and excluded by the states.

While women in many western states could vote sooner, all women were not able to exercise their right to vote nationwide until passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in , and they began to make up more than 5 percent of either chamber only in the s. Mink had been interested in fighting discrimination in education since her youth, when she opposed racial segregation in campus housing while a student at the University of Nebraska.

She went to law school after being denied admission to medical school because of her gender. In the wake of the Civil Rights Movement , African American representatives also began to enter Congress in increasing numbers. In , to better represent their interests, these representatives founded the Congressional Black Caucus CBC , an organization that grew out of a Democratic select committee formed in This photo shows the founding members of the Congressional Black Caucus, which at the time of its founding in had only thirteen members.

Currently, forty-six African Americans serve in Congress. In recent decades, Congress has become much more descriptively representative of the United States. The th Congress, which began in January , had a historically large percentage of racial and ethnic minorities. African Americans made up the largest percentage, with forty-eight members, while Latinos accounted for thirty-two members, up from nineteen just over a decade before. Yet, demographically speaking, Congress as a whole is still a long way from where the country is and remains largely white, male, and wealthy.

For example, although more than half the U. Congress is also overwhelmingly Christian. Indeed, the body of research showing the value of having women run for and attain political office is rich and growing.

The first argument for the equal inclusion of women, and all identities present in America, is basic fairness, says Kelly Dittmar, assistant professor of political science at Rutgers University—Camden and scholar at the Rutgers Center for American Women and Politics. Despite the significant gains in the midterms , women are still woefully underrepresented in American politics. As it stands , women occupy of the seats in the U. Congress, or If equal democracy is a sign of democratic openness, then our paltry representation of women, and especially women of color , shows American democracy is not an accessible — or healthy — system.

Setting fairness aside, women are vital to American politics because they bring symbolic power that comes with a cascade of benefits for democracy.

Our government needs the voices of people of different ethnicities, genders, races, sexualities and religions to advocate for the constituencies that are commonly overlooked and forgotten in the eyes of the government. Through diversity of ideologies and viewpoints in Washington, Americans will see a change in the way legislation is made and how lawmakers vote.

That way, decisions that are made can benefit a larger group of people. Stacks brings up a good point: when children, teenagers and young adults see people that look like them in public positions of power, they are empowered. They realize that there are people similar to them making changes in this world, and they feel encouraged to do the same.

Moving forward, I anticipate that we will be seeing a lot more humanitarian-based legislation welcomed to the floor and that more American voices will be heard by Congress newcomers.

That kind of thing … Those kinds of influences are plausibly kind of reduced in this context because members can really act on their own. He was taking an independent study with me at the time and during our discussion of descriptive representation he noted that our lawmakers also tended to be generally older than most Americans just as they are generally more male or whiter or richer than most Americans.

From there, he came back to me with the research design and a series of hypotheses and then we set to work. Grossmann: Lowande and Ritchie both collected data on congressional inquiries to agencies for their doctoral dissertations and decided to collaborate.

Lowande: Melinda Richie and myself both independently wrote dissertations that involved collecting some of these correspondence logs. Melinda Ritchie has a study that argues that members use these contexts to serve cross-cutting interest and I have another one that argues Federal agencies are prioritizing them strategically.

We essentially both realized that these records would be a good way to kind of shed light on some of this existing literature, so we kind of joined forces in that respect. Curry and Hayden first found all the bills that addressed issues of most interest to older Americans and connected them to each legislator.

They have every bill introduced into the House of Representatives coded by its primary issue content. I mean, some of these issue topics that they use were clearly senior-focused. But we also identified an additional 20 issue topics among their topics that might have included bills that addressed senior issues.

Basically, with them, we went through all the bills introduced into those 20 topics. Looking at their titles, reading their abstracts, sometimes reading the CRS summaries of the bills to determine whether or not those were primarily focused at senior citizens, which is essentially sort of the barometer we used.

Was this something that was primarily focused on affecting policies related to senior citizens, addressing issues that primarily affect senior citizens? In the end, we came up with over bills over four years that we coded as primarily senior issue bills. That meant reading a lot of bills. I think we had to read a couple thousand titles, abstracts, and summaries in order to do this, but it gave us a dataset that we were pretty confident in.

We designated basically those bills that received an above median amount of media coverage in the New York Times as high salient and everything else is low salience. Generally, that broke down as things that addressed Medicare or other healthcare programs that affected seniors were generally the ones that were highly salient. Everything else largely were things that were low salience.

Grossmann: Like Lowande, Curry wanted a measure that was under the control of the member rather than later stage voting. Curry: We wanted something that members of Congress had almost complete control over themselves in terms of what they did. Any member of Congress can introduce any bill on any topic that he or she sees fit. He or she can introduce as many bills as he or she wants on those topics or none at all. Their ability to introduce legislation is not really affected by any decisions made by the leadership or by their committee or by anything else.

If we were to look at what stuff receives a vote, that stuff that has to be approved from the leadership and other key members of Congress to get to the floor for a vote. With legislation, this is an indicator that these members of Congress made a point of drafting up and introducing legislation that addressed these issues and therefore had some reason to do so that may be affected by the constituency but may be affected by their own ages and around whether they were younger or older and how that related to their attention to these issues.

Grossmann: They found that both older constituencies and older members matter for different subsets of senior issues. Our model, the demographic representation model, we might call it, or the idea that members of Congress have these … Their age is being some facet of their identity or who they are. Curry: What we find in the paper with respect to these two models is that they both matter.

Senior constituencies have a lot of clout and influence over their representatives in districts with large senior constituencies, but largely in terms of driving their attention to or their propensity to introduce what we call highly salient senior issue bills. Meaning things that address things like Social Security or Medicare or other issues that clearly have obvious effects on seniors and that typically receive a lot of media attention.

Policies like assisted living for seniors, later life care, continuing education. Issues like elderly abuse.