Constituent Engagement in the Punitive Mode
Congress’ other job is to be a punching bag
You thought I would let this week go by without talking about how some Democratic offices are pissed at left-wing grassroots groups for flooding their offices with calls? I live for this stuff.
In our exploration of the forty ways Members of Congress engage with their constituents, we talked about how some of these roles become standard practice because Congress is filling gaps: gaps in agency customer service operations, gaps in local social services, gaps in symbolic/cultural sensemaking for communities.
One other big psychological, cultural, emotional gap that Congress fills for some constituents is a punching bag.
Less flippantly, we might call it constituent engagement in a punitive/cathartic mode, or, expanding out a bit, engagement as an emotional outlet.
I’ve been hesitating to write this one because I don’t want it to come off as “aww, poor little Congress getting yelled at,” or to minimize the reasons why people engage with their legislatures. A lot of the anger and frustration with Congress (and other legislative bodies) on both sides of the aisle is valid, justified, and frankly, shared by people on the inside.
But I think we miss a lot by ignoring the emotional dynamics of how and why constituents engage — what drives that engagement, what needs that engagement fills, and the impact of particular modes of engagement on the rest of the playing field.
The Equivalent of a Scream
The last several decades have — famously — seen American society become more and more atomized. At the same time, the information age has also made us more aware of forces beyond our control and how they are harming our lives.1 There’s more to be anxious or angry about, but fewer clear people to blame.
In the classic Loyalty/Voice/Exit trio, sometimes the expression of “voice” just needs to be a scream.
Scream into the void if you have to, but it’s much more satisfying to scream at someone, and that someone is frequently Congress.
The spectrum of things that I’m filing under this mode of engagement are actions from constituents intended to provoke an emotional response from Members and their staff, or to outright punish them for a perceived bad action or lack of action — the equivalent of a scream, engagement that is both communicative and punitive.
This might include angry phone calls and emails that shade into more extreme phone calls, including threats, harassment, and abuse. The volume of this type of tirade directed at Congress can be startling: last year, one person was arrested and charged for making over 12,000 harassing and threatening phone calls to Members of Congress, including 500 calls to a single office in a two-day span.2 The United States Capitol Police reports that threats to Members of Congress and their staff have risen dramatically in the last eight years, with over 9,000 reported threats to Members of Congress in the last year alone, including swatting incidents. At the other end, these interactions have involved actual violence or near-misses, culminating in the extreme cases of a mass shooting targeting Members of Congress and the January 6 riot at the Capitol.
The spectrum of engagement in this mode is not limited to the phones. We see it in other methods (distinct from “normal” protest or advocacy campaigns) that are intended to cause disruption to Congress or create some sense of moral parity or balance between the perceived harm at stake and Congress as the perceived villain/bystander — “Congress is causing harm, so I will make them feel bad enough to do something different.” For example, one activist group built tools to automate sending thousands of emails a day to Congressional staffers to demand a ceasefire in Gaza, with the explicit goal of shutting down Congressional operations for offices that had not signed on to a ceasefire resolution. Other protests or actions are not intended to cause operational disruptions, but emotional pain — like protesters carrying effigies of dead children to place outside Congressional district offices.
What Does This Tell Us about Constituent Engagement?
Standing back and looking at it all together, I think it stands on its own as a mode of engagement that is tapping into some deep-seated national need for an outlet. Maybe that need to blow off steam is a product of our current information/social media overload where everything is urgent and terrible and beyond our control. Maybe that need has always been there, but the ability to call your Members more easily than ever today bleeds off some kind of social energy that would have been redirected toward other channels in a different age. Maybe it’s a little of column A and a little of column B. We can think of this as one more service that Congress provides: a punching bag, the same way you would go work the heavy bag to blow off steam at the gym — except it’s interns answering the phones.
But for all that I don’t want to paint Congress as the victim here, this mode of engagement does have serious implications for the rest of the engagement playing field, and for the future of constituent engagement. Three things stand out to me:
In the full context of government and society, Congress represents an opportunity to talk to a person. Unlike just about any other corporation, agency, or level of government — you can call your Members of Congress and talk to someone who works directly for that person. You can’t do that in the same way with the President, let alone giant impersonal socio-political-economic forces. It’s the person-to-person reaction that I think matters for this mode: talking to an insightful Legislative Correspondent on the Hill recently about the Shotline incident, his theory was that constituents quickly give up after sending a handful of Shotline calls because there’s no reaction, you don’t get to hear someone respond. This means that, again, Congress is inextricable from the rest of government and society: the more the rest of the world shifts away from these person-to-person interactions, the more that Congress’ providing them will make it an outlet for those needs.
This is a tragedy of the commons. The majority of interactions Congress has with constituents are polite, and mutually respectful. But Congress does have legitimate and worsening safety concerns driven by a few people who spoil the playing field for everyone else. In response to these bad actors, Congressional offices are increasingly moving away from answering the phones live, closing their local office doors, more tightly restricting the possible ways that constituents can reach out to them. The answer to handling these issues so far has not been different engagement, but less engagement. Clearly, we need different solutions.
Efforts to design new systems of engagement that gloss over the emotional drivers of engagement are missing tricks. Methods of providing emotional catharsis have probably not been high on the feature list for new engagement platforms, but maybe they should be. Efforts to reshape how Members and constituents interact that are overly intellectualized or emotionally unsatisfying are doomed to fail. “How do I design an engagement method that provides a cathartic outlet for people who are upset and frustrated without unduly traumatizing the frontline staff who might otherwise be interacting with this person?” is a wild design question, but one that is absolutely fundamental to figuring out how we can do this better.
Those of us in the para-Congress world can sometimes spend so much time thinking about policy as the backdrop and implied/assumed purpose to engagement that it can feel odd to frame engagement as emotional — too wishy-washy, too New Age-y.3 Surely Congress is a machine that makes policy, and the more we can minimize the people and get back to the policy, the better off we’ll be, right? It can’t be Congress’ job to provide emotional succour and fund the government.
But I think that actually pulling out this mode of engagement and looking at what it tells us is valuable, even as it feels uncomfortable.
Congress has to be all things to all people because all people ask for all things: it needs constituent input more than ever to understand the impact of rapid changes in technology and society, and to prime and run the feedback loop that connects constituent experience to legislation to oversight to constituent experience and back again. That means that it has to channel the need for emotional outlets to get to the policy/lived experience insight. The two are fundamentally inextricable. We can’t create new methods of engagement that stick without taking into account the entirety of the constituent experience.
Check Your Voice/Mail
Approval ratings for Congress rose in January of this year — a normal partisan turn, but interesting in contrast with the wave of constituent engagement.
A handful of Committee minorities are soliciting input from constituents impacted by Trump Administration job cuts.
The incoming FTC Chair has closed several open public comment periods, including on surveillance pricing and noncompetes.
Scotland published a review of research on public participation in policymaking.
Reporting on the number of calls to Member offices in the last few weeks
Speaking of the emotional tenor of constituent engagement… sounds like the tide was turning last week on protests in DC.
I’m thinking so much about how Google is the arbiter of what things are called?
This is an interesting thread: how the perception of “doing something” is satisfying for constituents, even if people don’t agree with the substance of the action.
Niskanen has a podcast episode on group polarization — obviously a big driver of legislative engagement.
And a charming reminder that this is a lot of how constituent engagement works: people show up to staff office hours to talk about local energy projects.
Inflation, capitalism, racism, globalization, woke-ness, global warming, name your favorite giant socio-economic-political force.
Obviously, many of the more extreme individual cases reflect people in poor touch with reality, or handling mental illness.
Definitely too feminine/social science for this male-dominated field, yikes.