Representation in the U.S. Congress
A common idea nowadays about the Congress is that it is somehow controlled by forces outside the Congress itself. Depending upon one’s political orientation and degree of cynicism about what those forces are, such control could be interpreted as either good or bad. George Will considers members of Congress who refer to one another rather than their districts to be “careerists” whose terms of office need to be limited before the end of their natural lifetime; in his opinion, term limits will increase the representation by members of Congress of everyday citizens (Will 1992). 89-year-old Doris “Granny D” Haddock, who walked across the nation in 1999 in a call for campaign finance reform, spoke these words about “special interests” just before being arrested for reading the Bill of Rights aloud in the halls of the Capitol Building:
“Ladies and Gentlemen, the term ‘no taxation without representation’ has in our history been used by Americans to rebel against the idea of unfair taxation. Today, I should like to speak about the other side of that equation. In that we pay taxes, how about some representation? If our elected leaders take money from special interests, the access that is sold is in fact stolen from us --from ‘we the people.’” (exerpted from GrannyD.com)
What individuals or groups outside the Congress might have power over its members? Who does the Congress really represent? Different answers to these questions are considered below.
Representation and the Congress
The individuals with the perhaps the most direct control over legislators’ reelection fate are those who vote either for or against the legislator. Barring electoral fraud and races without opposition, it is impossible for legislators to be reelected unless they are voted in by their constituents. Not surprisingly, then, one of the most popular action-based explanations of congressional behavior is that members of Congress act according to the desires of their constituents (Arnold 1990; Downs 1957; Herrera et al 1992).
According to the principle of action, constituents’ desires are in turn determined by their position in society. For instance, gender denotes one important social position. Because men and women have differential access to resources (Rosenfeld and Kalleberg 1990), have different access to kin and work networks (McPherson and Smith-Lovin 1986), and are employed in different kinds of jobs (England and Dunn 1988), their rationally-based interests should differ. Feminist theorists point out that although there are a number of distinctions that divide women (Nelson 1984), they have at least some shared experiences of domination that imply a shared set of interests in overcoming that domination (Carroll 1994; Kelley et al 1991; Jones 1993; Jones 1988; Jonasdòttir 1988; Diamond and Hartsock 1981).
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