After working with so many individual Members of Congress, the research team wanted to see if there might be a chance 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.
IDEA also wanted to see if we could do the constituent opinion analysis in a way that would produce not just a nationwide view, but, by using sophisticated statistical methods (multilevel regression with poststratification), an estimate of constituent opinion for all 435 legislative districts. This would enable the data to be used not only within the Committee, but in building support with Members outside the Committee.
On October 6, 2022, IDEA convened the Deliberative Town Hall online, bringing together a nationally representative sample of over 1400 constituents together with Chair Derek Kilmer and Vice-Chair William Timmons. The topic of the event was “How to Improve Congress for the American People,” and participants had received background materials in advance containing 6 different policy proposals around that goal. The event was notably successful in retaining participants, with over 85% staying for more than an hour and nearly 1,300 completing a post-survey.
Results
IDEA’s report showed significant changes in public opinion on the policies discussed.
- Support for reimbursing congressional members for D.C. lodging expenses rose from 46% to 74%. This was particularly interesting as it had been seen as politically risky to suggest additional benefits for Members of Congress and their staffs, but when constituents found out how dire the situation was and how difficult it was for anyone not independently wealthy to stay in Congress, many constituents were persuaded.
- Support for increasing congressional staff salaries jumped from 46% to 79%. Constituents were persuaded to support a larger budget for staff training and retention when they learned more about the comparatively low pay and high turnover amongst congressional staff.
- 95% supported alternative hearing formats to promote bipartisanship
- 94% supported Oxford style debates to encourage in-depth discussion and discourage “debate by sound bite"
- 98% of participants supported more mechanisms for deliberative constituent engagement (like the DTH) with representative samples of constituents.
Just as importantly, though, IDEA’s reporting also revealed significant increases in trust and approval:
- The Select Committee garnered considerably higher trust and approval ratings among attendees than the control group, and attendees substantially increased their support from pre- to post. This suggests that even constituents who begin with low opinions of Congress can become more engaged and supportive when given the opportunity to participate in meaningful, substantive discussions.
- Participation increased trust and approval in Congress as a whole by 10 points. This indicates that DTHs are a powerful tool for increasing trust in democratic institutions, not just for individuals or committees.
- Perhaps most importantly, participation in the DTH decreased affective polarization among participants to 1993 levels. Before the DTH, both the treatment and control groups showed very similar rates of affective polarization, which were also very much in line with the rest of the country. But after the DTH, the treatment group’s level of polarization dropped over 50 points, to a rate we haven’t seen in the U.S. since 1993, while the control group remained the same. Furthermore, the surveys were conducted up to two weeks after the DTH, indicating this isn’t a short-lived phenomenon, but a durable effect.
Impact
The Committee was able to use its findings to increase support among both Committee Members and those outside for several of the recommendations. Additionally, IDEA’s research could estimate constituent opinion down to the state level from the national data by several important demographics, like race, gender and education. Committee staff said this granular data was particularly helpful for them to be able to share with Members outside the committee who were wary of some of the proposals. Two of these proposals were implemented when the new Congress convened in 2023.
Dr. Minozzi’s article on the affective polarization finding is currently a review and resubmit with the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “We think this is an incredibly important contribution to the field,” said Dr. Neblo. “A lot of research dollars have been spent trying to identify an effective intervention to reduce affective polarization, with very little effect. Even one of the most effective ones involved one Republican at a time talking to one Democrat about non-political subjects, and the effect went away when politics was brought up. Obviously, two people at a time is not a scalable solution, and we really do have to find a way to be able to talk about politics. Deliberative Town Halls are both scalable and directly about politics. It’s really astounding that one 90-minute intervention seems able to roll back 30 years of affective polarization.”