Changing the Parameters for Constituent Engagement

A new paper on how constituent service could work under proportional representation

A central mission of this newsletter is building up a thorough, detailed picture of how constituent-legislator engagement works today: I’ve said many times with varying degrees of curmudgeon-ness that I care so much less about how people wish it worked or how it worked [x] years ago than understanding the specific dynamics, people, technologies, incentives, practices, laws, limitations, etc. today. With that foundation, then we can move on to figuring out how it could work, or should work, and how we get there.

Today’s newsletter starts to point to why that’s important, and where it gets really exciting.

Over the last year, I’ve had the pleasure of working with Lee Drutman (with support from Protect Democracy’s Drew Penrose and feedback from several Congressional experts) on a new paper on how constituent services could work under proposed electoral reforms that would shift the House of Representatives away from a single-Member, winner-takes-all system to a proportional system where constituents would be represented by multiple Members serving the same district.

While POPVOX Foundation does not take a position on whether proportional representation and multi-member districts are the way forward, this was a really fun chance to think about what some of these big electoral shifts could mean for the landscape of constituent engagement. While we focus exclusively on casework in the paper itself (you know I’ll never miss the opportunity), in this conversation, we expand a little bit to think about engagement more broadly: how are Member incentivized to listen to their constituents — with the operational and management decisions to make constituent engagement a central component of how their offices function?

This week, I sat down with Lee and Drew to talk about the paper, what we learned in the process of writing it, and what it tells us about how our political system optimizes (or doesn’t) for specific types of constituent engagement.

Lee Drutman is a senior fellow in the Political Reform program at New America, and the author of Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America and The Business of America is Lobbying which won the 2016 American Political Science Association's Robert A. Dahl Award, given for "scholarship of the highest quality on the subject of democracy." Drutman is also the cohost of the podcast Politics in Question, a lecturer at The Johns Hopkins University Center for Advanced Governmental Studies, and writes regularly for FiveThirtyEight. He has also published numerous pieces in the New York Times, Washington Post, Vox, NBC Think, and Foreign Policy, among many other outlets.

Drew Penrose is a policy strategist with Protect Democracy, where he provides research and advocacy support toward efforts to make our democracy more representative and resilient. He brings over a decade of experience in the electoral reform space, including a prior leadership role at FairVote, where he led efforts for proportional representation and ranked choice voting. Drew is a graduate of the James E. Rogers College of Law at the University of Arizona.

Thanks again to Lee and Drew for their partnership on this paper, and for joining me on Voice/Mail!

---

Transcript

This transcript has been edited for clarity and may differ slightly from the audio recording.

Anne Meeker: Lee and Drew, welcome, welcome, welcome to Voice/Mail! We've spent the last year working together on our brand new paper: “Casework in Multi-Member Districts: How would it work?” So for me personally, I feel like you two both need no introduction, but would you mind introducing yourselves?

Lee Drutman: Sure. My name's Lee Drutman. I'm a senior fellow at New America, and also the co-founder of the Fix Our House campaign for proportional representation, the Center for Ballot Freedom campaign for fusion voting; I write the newsletter Undercurrent Events; I co-host the podcast Politics in Question — but the real highlight, Anne, has been writing this paper with you.

Anne Meeker: I'm flattered. I was going to say, we only have 45 minutes, so we got to keep the intro short, Lee! You do so much, Lee. Drew, how about you?

Drew Penrose: Yeah, well, fortunately I have fewer little addendums to my name. But I'm Drew Penrose, a policy strategist at Protect Democracy, and have been working on the idea of proportional representation in multi-member districts in some capacity or another for the past decade or so.

Anne Meeker: Perfect. And I will say that this paper is obviously co-published by Protect Democracy, POPVOX Foundation, and New America, but it is a Protect Democracy brainchild, so, Drew, we have you to thank for bringing us together, and the genesis for this project. So you and the Project Democracy team originally reached out to both of us with this idea for a paper focused on casework or constituent services — I will note up top here that we are probably going to use these terms interchangeably, but there is a distinction, we can get into that — how would constituent services work in a proportional representation system as part of Protect Democracy's work? So can you tell us where this idea came from and why Protect Democracy felt like it was important to focus on constituent service?

Drew Penrose: Yeah. So we came to it from the perspective of an advocate for multi-member districts and proportional representation. My team at Protect Democracy is interested in finding ways to make American democracy more resilient to threats from authoritarian candidates, parties, that sort of thing. And we identified proportional representation as a key way to do that, due to vulnerabilities in the two party system and the nature of winner-take-all elections, making everything this vicious head-to-head fight in every election. Proportional representation can really help us break out of that.

So in advocating for proportional representation and multi-member districts, most of the time you're talking about, you know, what it is, the impact it would have on representation and competition, and that sort of thing. But there's an audience of folks who have more particular questions that are important and absolutely need to be answered, but are a little bit higher level of detail than most members of the public get. And for that, we spun up this white paper series. So we've released white papers answering questions like, you know, does proportional representation work in a presidential system? Most countries with that are using a parliamentary system. Is there something we can learn about the fact that we have a presidential system? How would it impact governance? What would it do to the two party system exactly? Questions like that, and one that we get pretty frequently in my experience talking to people on the Hill — especially often, one of the first questions they have is: who are the constituents going to call? They're going to have multiple representatives. They need a pothole fixed, you know, or whatever. Who's the actual person they're going to call under this new system? And to my knowledge, nobody had really answered that question very thoroughly. So we thought this was a really good opportunity and are excited to get it out there.

Anne Meeker: Yeah, absolutely. And so then kind of the separate backstory for this paper, Lee, is that this has been part of your academic interest for many years, but you mentioned that there was a specific conversation you had with political science legend Jane Mansbridge that really kind of touched off an immediate interest in getting this out there. Can you tell us where that came from?

Lee Drutman: Yeah. Well, Jane Mansbridge is a legendary and brilliant political scientist, and so I take everything she says seriously. We were having a conversation about proportional representation, and she said, well, that's an interesting idea, but, what about constituency service? And this is something that had sort of been rattling around in my brain for a while, but, it really struck me as, you know, this is a really important issue.

And just to echo what Drew said before, there are a lot of people who ask a version of that question: “Well, how would constituency service work?” Members, staff, the general public, interested parties — which just speaks to how important the issue of constituency service is to politics, because that's where most people have their interaction with government, is saying “I have a problem with government, I need help.” You know, the policy stuff, the votes sometimes seem a little abstract, but, you know, if you're depending on a federal program and it's not working, that is incredibly personal. And that's the thing that sticks with you.

And so it struck me as a very important question, and I think I'll take anything Jane Mansbridge says very seriously. And so it just kind of kind of all came together in this magical moment in which we all teamed up like a Super Friends team to tackle this crucial question of our democracy.

Drew Penrose: Yeah. Speaking of the Super Friends team, Lee and I have spoken about how we're both advocates for proportional representation. POPVOX Foundation is not taking a stand on proportional representation and multi-member districts as the way forward particularly. But it does tie to a bunch of work that POPVOX does on casework, and I'm curious what your perspective is on it, Anne.

Anne Meeker: Yeah for sure. And I will say I actually host a working group on casework called in our calendar invites the “Casework Avengers” team. So it's nice to see multiple little Avengers teams teaming up to talk about casework, because it's surprisingly understudied. It's surprisingly not very well understood, even in communities of people really focused on Congress and congressional modernization.

But yes, the backstory for POPVOX Foundation's work here is partly that I am a former caseworker. I was a director of constituent services for a House office for several years. And since jumping to POPVOX Foundation, my work has really focused on looking at casework as really a linchpin for making Congress work better on so many levels. That it is a way that we're watching how interbranch relationships work; it's a way that we're watching — Lee, to your point about how trust is built and rebuilt for constituents — how Congress demonstrates accountability, how it shows that it is really on the side of the people that it serves, and how it learns about implementation, how it learns how agencies are not implementing the law the way that Congress intended and then gains actionable information that helps it fix that. So, casework has really been kind of a critical piece of our work.

I run a network of congressional caseworkers, our Casework Navigator program, where we develop resources to support caseworkers, and we work to kind of elevate that role of casework, and help it be more understood in this community.

So, yes, even though we do not take a stand on electoral reform questions, this was actually a really fun opportunity for me to do a little bit more speculative work thinking about how casework could work. All of our resources are geared toward helping caseworkers navigate the system as it is, so it was really fun to kind of step back and think about how would casework work differently in a different system. So this was really fun for us.

Drew Penrose: Anne, you mentioned casework being something that has not gotten a lot of attention traditionally, but I wonder if that's changing right now, particularly in this moment. As an anecdote, my mother called her Member of Congress for the very first time last week. And I imagine there's just a bunch of people that are in that category that either are calling for the first time because of everything going on in government, particularly with the federal government, with a lot of executive orders, everything that DOGE is doing, is really connecting to things that matter to individual people downstream. Or there are people who have contacted their members before, and now they're contacting a lot more — certainly there are a lot of anecdotes out there about Members being inundated with calls or even dodging contacts from constituents. And I wonder if we could talk a little bit more about what's going on with this particular moment and how it relates to casework and how it relates to this paper?

Anne Meeker: Yeah, absolutely. You're right. This has been an absolutely wild few months for casework. Definitely the most interest that I have seen in casework in Congress, outside of Congress, so far in my career. Certainly. So you're right: most of the time casework kind of operates in the background. It's something that happens almost exclusively in district and local offices, so it can be very disconnected from DC. Caseworkers kind of do their thing with their constituents, and then sometimes that makes its way through the policy pipeline to the DC side. But not always.

But then you see in these moments of crisis, whether that's the Afghanistan withdrawal, a natural disaster, or right now this huge uptick in casework demand related to DOGE, related to those executive orders, that suddenly that casework spills over into DC and that spills over very much into this national consciousness where folks suddenly realize that a lot of what Congress relies on to be effective in casework is about norms, and is about direct relationships with the executive branch that may or may not have not been codified anywhere. It depends on congressional capacity: how many people has Congress assigned to casework, how does it support and resource those people? How are Members incentivized to care about casework? What kind of resources do they personally assign from their budgets, from their staff counts, to really make that a priority and invest in their capacity to serve their constituents well?

So we are seeing this moment where more people than ever are asking for casework services, and that is throwing those questions into sharp relief, which is something that we definitely get into in this paper.

So then actually something that I wanted to dig in a little bit more with both of you is — again, I am new to the electoral reform, proportional representation, multi-member district space. And I was really kind of struck by something you both touched on a little bit, which is that a lot of the conversations around electoral reform really framed constituent experience solely in terms of policy outcomes or elections, but when you are actually getting these questions from legislators, from staff, they are focused on casework. Where do you think that gap comes from, and why is casework not been as much of a part of these conversations about electoral reform to date?

Drew Penrose: I'll say that the way that a reform conversation sounds today is very different from how it was when I first started on this work. It used to be that if I were talking about proportional representation with somebody, then it was almost a guarantee that it was the first time they had ever heard of it. And also it would sound very strange to them. The conventional wisdom is that Americans don't really think very much about electoral systems, and the most direct thing that a change to proportional representation would change is districts and how you vote, right, and how that vote translates into who's elected. And so conversations with people for the very first time very rarely got past that. It would just be explaining what it is: here's what it would do to districts. Here's what it would do to ballots. Here's what it would do to vote counting. Plus, you know, some amount of selling on the benefits of it.

But when something starts becoming real, then people start getting really interested in the details. So what are going to be further downstream effects of this? And I think constituent services, for a lot of people, falls into that category where when they were hearing about it for the first time it was like, oh, that's a nice idea. It didn't necessarily occur to them. But now that reform is something where, you know, the aperture has opened in a new way where people are really interested in it because everything in politics seems so chaotic now, they're looking for something positive to turn things around. That has started to change. And they're starting to ask like, if we really implement this, we need to be prepared for questions like how are members going to deal with constituent service requests?

So let's move into talking about the paper itself. So the fundamental question at the heart of the paper is, if we went to a proportional system with multi-member districts, how would this work? And I wonder if you could start us off with a little bit of an overview of how it works today so that we have some, some grounding in answering how it would change?

Anne Meeker: Yeah. Happy to. So in broad strokes, the way casework works today is that each individual Member really functions as their own small business, so each Member runs their own constituent services operation. Again, if you are a constituent, you have your choice: you can go to your House Member — your single House Member — or you can go to either of your two senators. So there's that first kind of element of constituent choice and figuring out who do you trust to handle this issue. So then each Member is responsible, has staff based in their district office, and they are responsible for all elements of work on that case: they do intake with a constituent; understand the problem; they obtain formal permission from the constituent to get information from the agency; they liaise with the agency to sort out that problem; and then they do any wrap up and follow through. Is there a resolution, whether it's good or bad? And then again, they translate any learning from the broad spectrum of all of the cases they handle to to their policy team, where appropriate.

So in thinking about how this could work, where we ended up landing for this paper was coming up with four models that we think all could be potential ways this lands for thinking about how would casework work in a proportional system. And in short, those four models are: shifting to members compete for casework; delegations pool casework services; parties pool casework services, or Congress establishes an independent ombuds service.

So the first is in some ways almost the most dramatic departure from where are today to where this could go — right now, there's no real competition on the House side for casework. If you want to go to the House, you have one option. So in this model, constituents would have multiple choices for different Members who all represent them.

So, a larger district, but more opportunities for different Members to start actually kind of competing for that casework business. This would definitely change some dynamics from what we see today, where there's currently a lot of cooperation among House districts, individual staff for Members will share information with each other, there's kind of informal staff mentorship channels. But in this [new model], we would actually start to see Members possibly look at their ability to do casework as kind of a competitive advantage. Can I do casework better than the other Members in this delegation who also represent this constituent? So that changes some dynamics in ways that are potentially really interesting.

And then the other models get to, well, instead of looking at a competitive model, would we see ways where individual Members might think about pooling some of their resources, where parties might pool some of their resources to kind of gain some efficiency in serving constituents?

So one clear option for this would be delegations pooling constituent services. There have been some case studies, some examples in the past where this has happened. So for example, individual Senators of a state actually hiring joint casework staff instead of individual casework staff for their offices. So we've seen that happen in the past on some level, it's definitely a possibility —especially with delegations from a single party or parties and coalitions.

And then on that line also, we think it's very possible that parties might also start to consider constituent services as a competitive advantage for that party. So maybe we'd see parties invest more heavily in helping their Members do good constituent services, or again, even pool resources to handle constituent services on party lines. Drew, you can definitely speak more to this, but I think there are some state-side examples of state delegations and state parties pooling and doing joint constituent services as well.

And then lastly, the kind of wildest option — but again, one that's been in the bloodstream for ideas around reforming casework for some time — would be that Congress would say, “Hey, constituent services is awesome, we think this is a wonderful way to serve our constituents, but we are not the best people equipped to be doing it. And so let's set up an independent Ombuds agency.” So it would be Congress actually moving constituent services out of its direct Member-specific purview and over into an independent agency. Again — it's not as far-fetched as it might sound: there were bills suggesting this move back in the 1970s that never went anywhere. And there are some international examples of this as well, including in Sweden, where this type of constituent service request is handled by a national ombuds.

So I think the factors that would nudge us into any of these four tracks really depend on a lot of variables, including some of the specifics of what kind of proportional system we'd end up with. But that was our first stab at just thinking through what this would look like and how it would work.

Lee Drutman: Yeah. And, and, we should not take for granted that, everybody understands proportional representation as much as we are steeped in it.

So for those who sort of have a vague sense of it, the idea is rather than having a single member district with a single representative, you would, say, have five representatives for your district. So it would essentially be combining five districts into one larger district and the seats would be allocated by party. So if a party got 40% of the vote in that five member district, it would get two seats that got 20%, it would get one seat. So theoretically you could have five different parties and you could have two, or you could have two, three candidates representing the same party.

So rather than having only one representative you can go to now, you potentially have five representatives. And you know, there are some questions around how big districts should be. But if we think about the most common form of proportional representation, which is an open party list system in which the parties put forward a list of candidates, and then voters choose both a party and a candidate within that party. What that means is that you have candidates competing against each other within the same party, similar to how our current primaries work, and also candidates from different parties competing for different constituents.

So, practically, what that means is that I think that probably the most likely model would be some sort of competitive model where, because you have different parties competing, that the parties and the candidates within those parties would want to show voters in that larger district that they are trustworthy, they care about people, and you should vote for them. And, I think that would probably improve the quality of constituent services, although there may be some caveats as districts get too big.

But the fundamental idea there is that if you have one representative and that representative isn't listening to constituents, doesn't hold town halls, isn't answering their phones, you're kind of out of luck. If you have five representatives, somebody is going to say, “hey, this is a great opportunity if other people aren't listening.” And you will also probably have a party that says, “hey, if we devote resources to our representatives everywhere, and we do better constituent services, better casework, we're actually going to be able to expand our vote.”

So, a little competition— that's kind of what drives our economy, right? And right now there's very little competition, 90 to 95% if districts are not even competitive. So it makes sense why, currently, as we're recording this in March 2025, a lot of Members are saying, you know, “we don't want to deal with town halls. Our constituents are too annoying, but we're in a safe Republican district, so it doesn't really matter. We're going to get reelected whether or not we listen to folks in our district.” Well, the calculus changes tremendously when there's much more competition.

Drew Penrose: Yeah. And in case this is seeming abstract or speculative, you know, the language you're using, it might be this, it might be this — it's worth keeping in mind that proportional representation is the normal way of doing elections across most of the world. Most democracies abandoned the use of single-Member districts a long time ago, and have been using some kind of proportional system ever since. And in all of those countries, constituent services is part of what legislators do. Even in the United States, there are no states that use proportional representation, but there are nine states that still use multi-member districts. So like Maryland, where I lived and voted before moving into DC, uses three-Member districts for its State House, and then one Senator is elected from the same district.

Now, those are not proportional, which means that those three members are almost always going to be from the same party, something like three Democrats if you're in a Democratic district, or three Republicans if you're in a Republican district. But that is still an instance where there were three representatives that I could potentially reach out to. And in that case, they were dividing up, they were sort of dividing up the district. So if you wanted to reach out to a representative for constituent services, you could reach out to any three of them. They all represent you. You voted for all three of them, but you had one who had a designated area for constituent services and would be sort of directed to that person.

Other states that I've looked into, even ones that don't have multi-member districts, will have other approaches. It varies a lot state by state. So like in Arkansas, for example, they divide up the entire state into four quadrants. And there are specialized staff for constituent services in each of those quadrants. So if you reach out to your Member, they'll direct you to that person and they'll work in coordination, so you'll work in coordination with that staffer and with your representative to get those services met.

So these are all things that have been tried already in lots of different places in the United States. I mean, I mentioned those multi-member districts are not proportional. And so a shift to proportional representation would be pretty different, even for those places that use multi-member districts, you might have similarly sized districts and you'd have multiple Members.

But, Lee in particular, I'd be interested in hearing from you about the specifics of proportional representation, how it would change. Two big things, I think, for proportional elections that would be different from our current use of winner-take-all: first is that every election is competitive, right? Any party. The threshold to win one seat is fairly low under a proportional system. And likewise, the threshold to win an additional seat for a party is fairly low. And so every vote really is going to matter in every election. And that's going to change how Members interact with constituents.

And the other is more parties. So I mentioned proportional representation being the normal way of doing elections around the world, something people might be familiar with is that these other countries don't have two-party systems. You will find at least four or five parties across most modern democracies, and that's in a large part thanks to the fact that they are using proportional systems, rather than winner-take-all. But, that's a very different dynamic [for casework] as well compared to winner-take-all, where you might have three Representatives, but they're probably not going to all be from the same party. So if reaching out to one isn't going to work for you, you have not just another representative, but their opposition in your same district. And I wonder what you would say is the impact of those two elements?

Lee Drutman: Right. So I think it's really important for folks to understand just how undemocratic our current system really is, in which we, you know, we have 435 House elections, but of those, you know, maybe 30 to 40 are actually two-party competitive. So functionally, we have 90% or so of districts that are essentially Soviet-style elections in which only one party has a real shot at winning.

And so within those districts, you know, there's not really a ton of incentive for those Members to do a great job of constituent service. Now, a lot of them do, because they feel a certain responsibility and they view it as an important part of their work, but it can vary quite a bit on quality of constituent service, because there's no real electoral pressure on them.

The other thing that's, you know, I think significant about all of these single-winner districts is that within those single-winner districts now, if a Democrat wins 65 to 35% in a district, there's still 35% of people who are Republicans who might feel that their Democratic representative is not really aligned with them and is not going to take their concerns seriously. There is some pretty good evidence that Representatives don't take the concerns of opposing-party constituents as seriously. You know, there may be sensitivities if a green card holder in a Republican district might think, “well, maybe my Republican representative is not going to be particularly sympathetic to my current circumstances, so I don't really have anybody who's going to help me out.” And, you know, practically, although they're not supposed to, people do go to other offices for help with constituent service now.

Those are problems with the current system. Not enough competition, so no incentive to do a good casework, or good service is sort of, you know, at the whim of the Representative, and a lot of people within a district feeling like “maybe this isn't the person who actually cares about me.”

Now, again, move to a five member district — there's a much higher likelihood that you voted for one of those five members. In fact, it's extremely high. And that is somebody who you feel represents you.

It's also a lot more likely that you have not only diverse ideology on party, but also diversity of life experience. More countries with party-list proportional representation have much higher percentages of female representation. Generally, parties look to run more diverse slates across a wide range of demographics, age, race, ethnicity, gender to try to appeal more broadly to a broad range of constituents. So it's much more likely you're going to have one of those representatives who you feel this is somebody who is going to get me, who is going to understand where I'm coming from, and is going to maybe specialize in the type of constituent service and casework that people like me need.

And again, because there's competition for seats within this district, no safe districts, there's a real advantage to the Member or the party that does a better job of showing up, being responsive and making citizens in that larger district feel like, “Wow. This representative really gets me; this party really understands what I'm going through.”

So I think that has potentially game changing, transformational powers to how Members treat casework and constituent service.

Drew Penrose: I wonder if you have a concrete example or two. You may not, but for example, in Finland, there are people reaching out to their representatives more. Are they getting better constituent services or in Germany or in Ireland? Are there stories from other countries that we can directly contrast with the experience in the United States?

Lee Drutman: I don't have stories, but I think it would be really cool to do a series where you bring on representatives from other countries to talk about how they think about constituency service. So just an idea there. It's, as Anne mentioned, there's just not a lot of literature on this. I think it would be really interesting to hear from folks in other countries.

Drew Penrose: And you gave a really good overview of, like, what it can be like to be a constituent and have this opportunity to reach out to somebody that is absent under the current system. Anne, I wonder if you could talk a little bit about what the experience might be from the Member side, and how that might change.

Anne Meeker: Yeah. Happy to. And I will say, I think to Lee’s point about just that we need more data here. We need more research here. We need more comparative examples here. One thing that we really found in the work behind this paper is there's not a lot of literature that really kind of focuses on the operational mechanics of how constituent services works in the U.S. context or abroad. And as you know, we know from our work with caseworkers, it's those operational mechanics that really dictate the constituent’s experience, and they also dictate the experience of the staff and the experience of the Members providing these services, which all kind of ties back and into how well are constituents served.

So from a staff perspective, a couple things would really change in interesting ways here. First of all, I think we talked about just the scale of the U.S. House congressional districts, and how it is an almost insane, impossible task to try to provide specialized, personalized, white-glove service to 750,000 constituents for individual Members of Congress, with a staff of 18-ish. For offices in high-volume districts, that is a huge, huge, huge challenge, and it really kind of creates a burnout machine for staff, that you are handling these really difficult cases day in, day out. You're understaffed, or handling too many cases. You don't have the support that you need.

And so we also see (and I’m publishing something on this next week), an uptick in uptick in the amount of staff turnover for caseworkers on the House side. And when we have staff turnover, that means we lose institutional knowledge. We lose the skills from those experienced staff that let them do casework well. So actually representing fewer constituents might even be something that makes casework just more manageable and brings it down to a more human scale.

Some other things here, I think would really be interesting in terms of their operational impact. One of them, we've talked about how Members might be incentivized to kind of compete and specialize for certain types of casework — that would require Members to attract and retain specialized staff. So that in itself could actually create more of a career and more of a career trajectory, more of a career pipeline, more specialization, more professionalization for casework, where Members are really competing for the best caseworkers or the caseworkers with the most specialized skills. That definitely seems like it would increase the value of those casework staff, which again, helping out with compensation, with retention, just with professional satisfaction would be great.

One thing that I would be concerned about specifically in that competitive model is one problem that we already see in looking at how constituents have the choice between their House Member or their senators, both of their senators — something we call Member shopping, where a constituent goes to one of their Representatives, doesn't get the answer they like, so they go to the other two. I would definitely imagine that this would be something we would see in this competitive model. And there is a capacity impact there, where you might have multiple officers all handling the same case, multiple offices submitting inquiries to the same liaison. We might just see an increase in traffic in the system that doesn't necessarily result in better, more efficient answers on behalf of constituents. I think there are some ways to mitigate that — again, some of these other models where there's more cooperation might bring that down a little bit — but it would be something I would definitely keep an eye on.

The other thing too, that we haven't really touched on, is that this would dramatically improve, or has the potential to dramatically improve, transition between Members. So right now, each Member of Congress is the personal owner of any data that they take in in the course of casework. And what that means is, at the end of the Congress, that Member gets to decide whether any open cases get transferred to their successor. We've seen some really high profile examples of Members just closing out all their cases when they leave, and really leaving their constituents in the lurch. That new Member is already on the back foot trying to pick up these open cases when they don't know which ones were open, they don't know the status, they are behind on everything, they don't have the records, don't have the documents.

So what this would also do would create some opportunities for a constituent to say, “hey, I know that this Member I've been working with is leaving, but I am represented by so many more choices. So would I have the option to transfer that case to someone just to ensure some continuity,” instead of just that dramatic, abrupt end at the end of that Member's term.

And the last thing I just wanted to say about these models too is one thing that we really point out in the paper that I think is important: thinking about how this transition would work, we don't expect that it would be an all or nothing choice. We might see multiple of these different models exist side by side. We might see them be kind of sequential, where maybe we start out competitive and then offices see the efficiency in pooling resources, or then certain states, maybe certain delegations pool resources and others don't.

And some of these are — not the competitive one — but the other three models are technically possible today. There is nothing stopping Congress except a couple of rule changes from sharing this labor, doing joint casework today. But it's thinking through this shift [to PR] that really puts some juice behind the idea of [casework] reform, and what could casework look like? That, I'm really excited about. It's nice to have this conversation about how casework could be different, whether we shift to a proportional system or not.

Lee Drutman: Yeah. And I really do think that there would be a much stronger incentive for parties to coordinate casework. Because if parties are going to be competitive everywhere instead of just mostly in their safe districts, there's a real incentive to figure out how they can provide resources and sharing and coordination among their representatives.

But I think the point about forum shopping, which is already a problem, is something that is going to demand some kind of solution. And, you know, I think there are certainly ways we could think about that, such as some sort of centralized ombudsperson — that's one of the suggestions in the paper — who could just sort of help to oversee the entire system. I think Members, representatives are going to want to continue to do constituency service. I think a lot of them find it really important.

Anne Meeker: So for both of you again, we've been working on this paper for a year, and it's been really delightful to just be able to have the freedom and have the time to work with you both and dive in on this. So I'm just curious for both of you: how do you see constituent services as part of the conversation around electoral reform going forward? Did the process of working on this paper change how much you see it as essential or the role that you see it playing in these conversations with stakeholders, with legislators about what's possible?

Drew Penrose: Well, I mentioned earlier that what the reform conversation sounds like has changed over the years. And one thing we've learned is that just talking about the change in government, in sort of abstract terms, isn't going to be enough for most people. They need to know how it will impact their lived experiences. And learning about the extent to which the lived experience of people's interaction with government involves this issue has certainly changed how I think about, you know, talking to ordinary people about what they can expect from this. Talking about proportional representation as a reform that will create incentives for Representatives to care more about hearing from you is definitely a way that I think should be emphasized more in the reform community going forward.

Lee Drutman: Yeah, yeah, I totally agree with that point and it is exciting to be having these conversations about how we would actually work out the details of a shift to proportional representation. I really do think that in the years that both Drew and I have been working in this space, that the conversation has shifted from “Well, that's a good idea, but it would never happen,” to “Well, maybe it would happen, but let's figure out what all these details would look like before we do it.” So it's exciting to be part of these conversations.

I always understood that constituency service and casework was important, but like many folks, I was kind of limited in my understanding of it by the lack of attention to it. So working on this paper with one of our foremost experts on casework has really expanded my understanding and made me think a lot more about how the details really matter in making casework actually work. And also what an important opportunity it is for representatives to build back some trust in government in a moment in which it feels like people have so little trust, and people are so cynical about what government can actually do.

So I think it's been tremendously exciting to work on this project together. And I think there's still a lot of hard thinking that we need to do as we move forward. But I think we have a tremendous template and framework for doing that thinking right now, thanks to all of our work, but especially yours, Anne.

Anne Meeker: I'd say expert by default — there are just not very many former caseworkers in our space! But thank you for the kind words. but, yes, I would absolutely echo what both of you said. This has been such a pleasure to work on. It is so, so wonderful just to see casework get the attention that it deserves. Lee, to your point, it's been kind of an under the radar, unsung tool in Congress’ toolkit for really building and rebuilding that trust. So it's great to see that casework’s elevation as part of this conversation around the need for electoral reform that also just elevates the role of casework today and validates the work that caseworkers are doing in these really thankless jobs, and says, “hey, you know, this is important. It deserves our attention.” So that's, that's been really wonderful to see in its own right as well. So thank you thank you both for the chance to work together on this project.

Let me wrap up by just letting folks know where they can go find more from all of us and more on this project:

We at POPVOX Foundation have more of our research and resources for caseworkers at popvox.org/casework.

Lee Drutman's wonderful newsletter Undercurrent Events is at leedrutman.substack.com.

Protect Democracy's newsletter If You Can Keep It is at ifyoucankeepit.org (you win the prize for the most streamlined URL in this list!).

And then our newsletter from POPVOX Foundation on constituent engagement is at voicemailgov.substack.com.

So Lee and Drew, thank you both again for joining us. And thank you so much for your partnership on this project. It's been really fun.