Connecting to Congress
Dr. Michael Neblo discusses IDEA's Connecting to Congress initiative with Congressional staffers
Connecting to Congress (C2C) is the IDEA’s flagship research initiative in the U.S., dedicated to strengthening the relationship between Members of Congress and their constituents. Through our innovative Deliberative Town Halls (DTH), we foster meaningful, bipartisan discussions that translate into actionable insights on policy matters. C2C not only enhances Congress's ability to engage effectively and constructively with the public but also provides valuable data on how these interactions influence constituent opinion, bolster support for democracy, and inform congressional decision-making. To date, IDEA has facilitated over 30 DTH events, with bipartisan participation and reaching more than 7,200 citizens nationwide. Recognized as a best practice by the Select Committee on Modernization of Congress, our approach is setting a new standard for civic engagement in Congress. Learn more about the SCMC Deliberative Town Hall.
In rigorous randomized control trials, the gold standard for scientific research, Deliberative Town Halls (DTHs) have been shown to:
- Produce double-digit increases in trust and approval of the participating Members
- Increase trust in Congress as a whole
- Increase participants’ likelihood to vote by as much as 10%
- Attract citizens from every walk of life, not just the most already-engaged
- Reduce the hostility between citizens from opposite parties, or polarization, by more than 50 points in some cases
Purpose and Progress
In 2006, thirteen Members of Congress – frustrated and dissatisfied with the status quo politics and limited opportunities for constituent engagement – agreed to work with IDEA Director Dr. Michael Neblo and his collaborators on a set of unprecedented field experiments—the first-ever Deliberative Town Halls. Following a series of articles in peer-reviewed journals on the findings, Dr. Neblo co-authored Politics with the People: Building a Directly Representative Democracy in 2018, linking all the findings into a single compelling argument. This led to IDEA receiving grant funding to reboot and expand the project to evaluate whether the positive impacts continued to hold in an era of higher polarization and to further investigate how DTHs impacted policymaking.
Since 2019, 21 Members of Congress have participated in 17 Deliberative Town Halls with around 7,200 constituents. IDEA works with congressional offices to define the topics for each DTH so that both Members and citizens can address pressing policy issues, including workforce development, the government's response to COVID-19, our online future, and American infrastructure. Citizens invited to attend the sessions receive nonpartisan background materials, developed collaboratively by congressional offices and IDEA researchers, in advance of the sessions.
How a DTH works
What makes a Deliberative Town Hall "deliberative"?
Impact
The DTHs and their reports had significant impacts on the actual decision-making. The IDEA team conducted interviews with the participating staff members to determine what, if any, effect the DTH experience and/or report had on their office’s communications, legislative, and other representational activities. Congressional staff reported the following:
- Participating in this session helped one Member decide to support an alternative COVID-19 relief bill in addition to a competing bill they favored but which had less support, because town hall participants conveyed frustration with partisanship.
- One office said that the issue of the Deliberative Town Hall had not been a major one for the Member before, but that after participating in the town hall, they realized that it was an issue that people cared about and would reward him for acting on. “Staff used it as a proof point to decide to work on it and decide to get more involved in other legislation on. We decided to go look for bills to join, and other ways to work on the issue.” This resulted in the Member co-sponsoring a new bill on the issue and reintroducing another bill to address one of the policy items.
- One office noted that the data in IDEA’s report about objections from a wide range of constituents to a nationwide policy proposed by the Biden administration was useful in conversations with the administration and other party officials about messaging on the policy.
Expansion to Congressional Committees
After working with so many individual Members of Congress, the research team wanted to see whether there might be an opportunity to increase both legislative/policy impact and trust and approval of Congress by working with a congressional committee. Throughout the reboot of the Connecting to Congress project, one of our strongest supporters was the staff of the Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress. Modernizing constituent engagement was a particular focus for the Select Committee, and they wanted to participate both to get feedback on some of the remaining recommendations they were considering and to model innovation and collaboration.
Learn more about the SCMC Deliberative Town Hall.
Learn More
Traditional town halls are one of the most typical ways Members of Congress communicate with constituents. However, conventional town halls have become less effective and more risky in recent years— as polarization has increased, they have tended to attract only the most partisn constituents, and/or “the usual suspects,” who take every opportunity to engage with their Member. They generally don’t attract the large swath of citizens who aren’t engaged, and thus offer limited gains for Members really trying to understand their constituency’s concerns and priorities. Additionally, town halls have recently become seen as potential weapons, opportunities to force a stumble by the Member and drive negative media coverage.
Even at their best, the format of traditional town halls often lead to two other problems: over-broadness that doesn’t allow the conversation to get beyond toplines and talking points, and the perception that the conversation is being stage-managed by staff to avoid tough questions for the Member. Both these problems lead to a ‘defensive’ posture among participants, which means that even if the events go well, they often don’t result in any new information to Members or any change in opinion among constituents.
“Deliberative” town halls are designed to overcome these limitations and create town halls that facilitate constructive, two-way communication. The key elements of a deliberative town hall are:
- Representativeness: Specially recruiting a representative cross-section of constituents to participate, and holding the event online to make it as accessible as possible.
- Focus: Limiting the town hall to a single issue facilitates more substantive conversation that gets beyond talking points.
- Information: Providing non-partisan background information on the issue in advance allows constituents to form more informed opinions.
- Independence: Having a neutral third-party moderate the town hall emphasizes to constituents that this is not an informercial, leading to more authentic participation and the opportunity to create trust and persuasion.
- Candid, real-time participation by Member: Seeing a Member of Congress make themselves available for questioning in a transparent environment engages constituents in ways that no other communication can.
These are the simple, but crucial elements of a “deliberative town hall.” However, though simple, they can be very difficult for a congressional office to implement on their own, which is why the Connecting to Congress exists— to provide the capacity for this kind of town hall, and the additional research and analysis documenting its impact.