More people write lawmakers, don’t think they care

Most U.S. citizens corresponding with Congress don’t think lawmakers are interested in what they have to say.

Nonetheless, they continue to barrage them with letters, phone calls and particularly e-mails to express their opinions, according to a report issued on Tuesday by the nonprofit Congressional Management Foundation (CMF).

{mosads}“As a result, while more messages are being sent to Congress, it seems that less actual communication is occurring,” the report concludes.

CMF polled more than 10,000 people to explore how Americans feel about communicating with Congress and what compels them to contact lawmakers. Most of the polling was done over the Internet.

While some of the findings dishearten CMF Executive Director Beverly Bell, she takes the study as a sign of the positive change to come.

“It seems like a disconnect, but overall I take it as a positive message that even though people might feel their members don’t care, they still believe that it’s very important to express their opinions,” Bell said.

The new conclusions come three years after a CMF report found that offices on the Hill were receiving four times as many communications as they were a decade before. The majority of the correspondences were through the Internet.

According to the new study, more than 40 percent of voting-age Americans contacted a U.S. senator or representative in the last five years. That’s up from 20 percent in 2004.

Two-thirds of those polled who contacted lawmakers said they did not receive a response. Nearly half of those who did get a response had complaints. They said they were not satisfied, that the response did not address their initial concern or that it was too politically biased.

The report does not give an explanation for the dissatisfaction but states, “there appears to be a disconnect between their (congressional offices’) idea of what constituents want and what constituents actually want.”

Bell said the perception of political bias could be due to the tendency of politicians to turn any negative comment about them into a positive talking point on things they have done to better the lives of Americans.

The rise of interest group outreach efforts such as mass e-mailing campaigns has contributed to the increase in communication between constituents and lawmakers.

More than 80 percent of people polled who contacted members of Congress were asked to do so by a third party, the report said. They were more than twice as likely to donate money or time to a political campaign than people who did not contact lawmakers and four times more likely to do so for an advocacy campaign.

Yet in conducting research for the report, CMF found that congressional staffers doubt that the constituents, who sign on to identical letters at the prompting of advocacy groups, are truly informed on the issues they are writing about.

“Our data shows that the main reasons these constituents contact a member is because they care about an issue regardless of whether they did so at the request of another party,” Bell said. “This is not just herd mentality.”

The majority of those who contacted members of Congress trust interest groups to provide them with informative and trustworthy information more than the offices of lawmakers on the Hill.

The substandard websites of many members could lead constituents to feel uncertain that members have better information. The majority of websites received failing grades by CMF in its annual Mouse Report earlier this year.

Bell said she does not think Congress is perpetually doomed to be behind the technological times and sees the report as a huge opportunity for lawmakers because it shows people want to communicate with Congress.