The Known Unknowns of Constituent Engagement
Constituent priors with political scientist Megan Rickman Blackwood
Some observations about who participates in politics or who engages with government can feel self-evident — like, duh you’re less likely to call Congress if you’re working multiple jobs and struggling to find the time, or obviously you’re probably less likely to call a representative that you didn’t vote for. But sometimes those observations can feel like a self-fulfilling prophecy, with no obvious room to change the status quo.
My guest today, Megan Rickman Blackwood, is a practitioner-turned-academic, and part of what I love about her work is that she looks specifically at ways to change the landscape for engagement — what circumstances lower the barriers for engagement, and what methods of engagement truly build trust.
In this conversation, we cover:
What skills and experiences make a constituent more likely to reach out to their elected representative, and how does that change situationally
How can legislative offices figure out who they’re not hearing from
How media portrayals of government impact constituents’ likeliness to engage
How proactive outreach increased one office’s contact with constituents by a mind-boggling 1,728% (not a typo)
Perceptions of common interest as critical to building trust
Want more on Megan’s research? She was also kind enough to join us last year for a webinar for our Casework Navigator program, and you should check it out.
Anne: Megan, I will start out by saying that half of the fun of this project so far has been getting to talk to my friends, people who are so smart in this universe of thinking about constituents and Members and how they interact and intersect. So I am absolutely thrilled that you are here. Thank you so much for joining. Would you mind introducing yourself and saying a little bit about your background?
Megan: Yeah, happy to do it. My name is Megan Rickman Blackwood. I'm currently a PhD candidate at UNC Chapel Hill, and I study representation. More specifically, I study how casework serves as substantive representation. So thank you to all the caseworkers out there.
My background is I'm a non-traditional Ph.D. student, I'm a little older. Before I came back to school, I was fortunate enough to work in the Office of State Senator Mamie E. Locke in Virginia, and that's where I got exposed to casework, where I got a chance to see it firsthand and see the difference it could make in people's lives.
The big thing that drives my study is that when I came back, the study of Congress didn't include casework extensively at all. The last time this was studied was in the 70’s. Really. So my biggest goal right now is reviving the study of casework and hopefully flipping our understanding of it and centralizing it as a form of representation, and then also hopefully getting people on board with a proactive approach as opposed to a reactive approach.
Anne: Love it, and we are going to talk much more about that in a second. But one of the things that I really appreciate about your work — well, let me back up to say that this newsletter and this project so far has been very focused on the Member side, on the elected official side of thinking about legislator-constituent interactions. That's my background, that's my bias. But your work really has this empathetic focus on the constituent perspectives and their attitudes about engaging with elected officials, which — it takes two to tango. Can you walk us through what political science has to say today about who participates, and what does it take to be in a position to participate?
Megan: Absolutely, and on the participation end, this is something we know really, really well. We know that socioeconomic status is a huge factor, income, education, political knowledge is massive. The scholarship has spent a lot of time diving into people's political knowledge, and results aren't great. It doesn't look good for the constituent — even just knowing the name of their state representative is about 8%. You also have to have what I like to call “civic skill acquisition.” A lot of times this is going to be coming from your attendance at church, participation in a union, any of the hierarchical structures that teach you how to navigate a space like that. That's kind of a bucket that I like to call participation priors.
Then there also has to be a certain set of belief priors. The big one that I like to talk about is internal efficacy. So, for your audience, picking up the phone and calling your Member of Congress might seem kind of like a small thing, right? Like they get calls all day, every day. But for a lot of people, a Member of Congress is kind of still this hallowed position. It's this big, scary thing that “little old you" doesn't really feel comfortable calling, or feel like you have the confidence or the ability to call and ask for something. Then there's also external efficacy that leans more into trust. Like, do I trust that if I reach out to this system that's supposed to be here to help me, are they going to help me? Are they going to help me specifically? Is the system itself capable of helping me?
So you've got to have some skills, some tangible knowledge skills, and then there are beliefs that you have to have, and that's kind of the two things that we think of when we think traditionally about participation.
Then, again, looking at casework, there's a really important third factor that comes in for constituents, and it's going to be their motivation. You know, a lot of times, people that are reaching out, they're reaching out on the hardest day of their life. They're having the hardest situation that they've ever faced: sometimes whether or not they can stay in the country, whether or not they can be employed, whether or not they can feed their family, right? These are really highly-motivating issues.
So for people that are low in those things we just talked about before, whether it's low socio-economic status, low civic skills, low trust — for them, they need a lot of motivation. That's where we see those Hail Mary calls, when you are low in those participation priors and belief priors that we talked about, but your motivation is really, really high because it's going to be a tangible benefit for your family.
For people that are high in those things we talked about before, the socio-economic status, civic skills, efficacy, trust, they actually need less motivation to call. We like to refer to them as the frequent flyers, right? They have really high internal efficacy. They know that if they call they have the skills that they need to ask for services, and then they feel like they're important enough that, of course you're going to help them, even if it's a small issue. So for them, the motivation oftentimes needs to be significantly less than it does for somebody that's lower in those other skills that we talked about.
That's why I really push for a proactive approach, just because when we look at the science of it, it is not rational to expect people to participate in this way, because it takes so much. We really do need to start just meeting constituents where they are.
Anne: Especially in a time like right now where Member offices are getting so many calls — it’s interesting to think that these move-fast-and-break things reforms are kind of lowering that barrier to participation, where more people feel that they have to reach out, that they can reach out, that they should be empowered to reach out. But it’s still important for Congressional offices, for legislators to understand that no matter how many people they’re hearing from, there are probably still some people that they are hearing less from.
So for offices as they're thinking about their strategy and the tactics they're using to reach their constituents — how should they be thinking about specific populations of people who are less likely to reach out to them? Do we have kind of a mind map for who Member offices are missing?
Megan: Yeah. We already know that rural Americans are underrepresented in casework services. This was established in the 70’s. Also, we know our immigrant populations are being negatively affected right now, and if we think of that external efficacy, that belief and trust that the government is going to serve them, they have a lot of questions about whether or not it is safe to make contact, whether or not that's going to put them at risk.
If we just go back to what I was talking about at the beginning, we can think about a checklist. You know your district, which constituents in your district aren't ticking a lot of those boxes of knowledge, belief, trust, and motivation. Where is there a lot of poverty? Where are there a lot of people relying on government services, unsure of whether or not they're going to be there tomorrow? Those are the people that you may need to be more proactive in reaching out to.
And then also pay attention to your Hail Marys. That's a canary in a coal mine, right? So don't wait until you've got 100 of them to be like, “Oh, this is an issue.” Start focusing, right? If you've got a dozen or so calls focusing on the same issue for the same population in your district, that is a beautiful opportunity to work your network and find out how can you reach those people. How can you reach them in a way that's trusted? Rely on your community, rely on the strength of the networks you built in your district.
Anne: One thing that you've touched on a little bit is that so much of this is driven by the media. We are in wall to wall, 24/7 coverage of what's happening right now. And you called out something in your thesis that I can't stop thinking about, which is the impact of media that focuses on the negative about our politics, so media focusing on scandal, and what that does to people's trust and their sense of efficacy when they go talk to their government. Can you say more about how that works?
Megan: Yeah, absolutely. The person I'd love to point to on this is Abramson, 1972, who came up with the “political reality model.” And I can rephrase it 1000 times, but there's nobody better than Abramson himself, so I'm just going to read you the quote:
“In a political system characterized by majority rule, the minority realize that they have little political power, and they respond to this reality by exhibiting negative political attitudes and expecting little representation in the political system.”
The political reality model drives a lot of my expectations and understandings about constituent behavior. Understanding that the person you're going to call is going to help you and trust you is something that I think a lot of us take for granted, right? Abramson's model really goes into depth showing how it is rational for some people not to expect that. We should expect this to be their behavior based on the world as it is shown to them.
Now, Abramson was doing this theorizing around the time of civil rights. But when we think about where we are now, it's really hard to find a population that's been unscathed by the media telling them that the government doesn't care about them. Everybody has a channel they can turn to that tells them that the government is against them, regardless of what side they're on. So no matter when you pick up the phone and who you talk to, it's probably somebody who has doubts about your ability to really intervene and help them.
But for people that you've already proved with a hands-on experience that you're there for them, and you're going to be there for them, and you want to serve as a good representative to your district or your state — it's really hard to argue when someone can say, “Yeah, but I called my Member and they helped me with X, or my mom called and they helped with Y.” Like you really do have the opportunity to disrupt that narrative and change the opinion of the people you're helping, and then also the people that are around them.
I briefly touched on it, but there's a study from 1994 that showed when people had had direct contact with a Member, and called for constituent service or casework services, they reported a ten-point increase of more trust and positive feelings towards that Member. But for people that could recall a friend or a family being helped, they had a twelve-point increase. So if you help one person, you're increasing the trust, and you're breaking that narrative within communities of the friends, family, coworkers, of the person you're helping.
Anne: That is such a wild statistic, that you think more favorably of a Member for helping someone in your community instead of yourself. That's something that feels hopeful for rebuilding trust. And all of this is just pointing us to the crux of your research — I know you're still working on replicating and expanding some of the trials that you worked on in your thesis, but I wonder if you could tell me about your work on the State Senate in Virginia on proactive casework theory.
Megan: I was really blessed to get to work with Delegate Sam Rassoul in Virginia and run a trial of this. So what we just did was, instead of just waiting for people to call, they use the same calling software that you do usually for campaigning to get volunteers in the office to call every registered voter and ask two questions. They asked how people were doing, and asked them if they had any issues with the government. If they did, how could they help?
For just pure contact purposes, like the percentage of people contacted? We were able to increase contacts to constituents by 1,728%. I always have to pull the number up because it's so ridiculous — but if you think about it, it makes sense.
At the federal level, I understand it's a little different, you're getting more, you know, 100 to 200 cases a week, as opposed to the 31 we got over a three-month period in Virginia. But just by calling people, just reaching out, asking them how they're doing, we're able to really increase the amount of people that are reached out to, that are touched, and just that touch alone has an increase in positive feelings towards the Member, right? One of the big things that we found that I really like to talk about is that we also increased the percentage of services that reached marginalized populations by 25%. So just by reaching out to people, instead of waiting for people to come to you, we really were able to reach into that kind of invisible group that oftentimes falls between the cracks in offices and in districts.
Anne: In your thesis, you have this beautiful framing of the fact that we tend to think about trust in these big picture, sweeping arcs of living in our society, about sources of political knowledge, electoral systems. But it's also so much built through these individual actions, these cases, these, “hey, I called my Member office and had a good experience talking to one of their interns” moments. So how do you think about balancing those two? How do the really big picture sources of information, fragmentation, media ecosystem, partisanship, whatever — balance against and interact with, “Well, this Member picked up the phone when their constituent had a natural disaster and needed help?”
Megan: I think one of the best things I've come across is actually this quote from Bianca, 1994: They're talking about constituent trust, and they've gone through all of the big picture stuff. They have talked through media. They have talked through situationality in the community. They've talked about real partisanship. They've torn all this down, and they end with: it really depends on a constituent’s perception of common interest with their Member.
I think of that a lot when thinking about how casework can affect trust, and can impact the trust that people have for their Member. When we think about a common interest, big picture, we're often thinking about policy compatibility — how much do my preferences align with your preferences? Even in political science, there is a measure that will count the lines on a scale of how far more liberal or more conservative your member is based on your preferences, based on an index of questions about what you think of different policies, right? We'll do all these massive things to think about common interest when it comes to policy — but we don't think about it often when it comes to personal issues.
Your common interest can be that you both want this case to be resolved. Your common interest can be that you both want to hear an answer back from this agency, and it's been six months, and they said they'd be back in 90 days. And your common interest is you really want to just get an answer, right? Your common interest could be you really want to make sure this form gets filled out for your constituent, and you both want to make sure they make it to their niece's wedding in Italy, right? Like we can find a common interest in a lot of places.
The media and the political environment we're in currently would trick you into thinking that there are some members of your constituency that you just are never going to find common ground with, but in casework, there are so many moments where you both care about the outcome, and those are the places where we build trust. Those are the places where that intimate relationship allows you to break through a narrative that is telling them that you don't care, the government doesn't care, the government's not going to help them.
This is the moment where you can insert a piece of information into that swirling information environment in their brain, so that when they think about their Member of Congress, it's not just going to be “Oh, Washington” or “Democrats” or “Republicans,” it's going to be that “I talked to Susie at his office, and she really helped me with my passport situation. I have an intimate connection to that person, and that's going to outweigh all the stuff I heard on the news, all the stuff I read on the internet.” That is a personal touch that centers on a connected, common interest, and that really is, I genuinely think, where you have the most ground to really make a positive change for your district and the people of your district.
I love this interview! Thank you so much. This information confirms what I've found in my own research with district staff.