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Is the Public Really Angry?
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19770 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
Date : |
3 / 1991 |
2,422 Words |
| Author
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John Marini
John Marini is associate professor of political science at the
University of Nevada, Reno. He is coeditor of The Imperial
Congress (1989). |
The American public has long scorned the U.S. Congress. In recent years, public indignation has intensified as a result of a series of widely publicized events concerning the legislature, which included backhanded attempts to raise legislators' salaries, various scandals concerning the leadership, members' involvement in influence peddling, the inability to control spending and balance the budge, and the widespread perception that Congress is unable to govern in the public interest.
Is the public angry at Congress? The recent elections results would not seem to indicate that this is the case. Yet public opinion polls taken just two days before the last election showed that 69 percent of the public disapproved of Congress' performance as an institution. Of telling importance, however, is that 51 percent of those surveyed in the same poll approved of their own congressman.
One of the paradoxes contemporary American politics is that members of Congress are able to disassociate themselves from the fate of the institution to which they are elected. How does this happen? Why does the American public, on the one hand, scorn the institution that serves collectively as a representative body of the people and, on the other hand, often admire and vote for the individual member? Why do we observe, with increasing regularity, individual candidates for Congress--including incumbents--who run for national office by running against Congress as an institution? Perhaps the reason is, as Harvard professor Morris Fiorina has observed, that "the individual members can achieve their primary goals independently of (and even in opposition to) the ends for which the institution was created."
To put it simply, Americans no longer hold individual members accountable for the performance of the institution. Congress is not judged as a body; hence, those functions that contribute to collective goals, such as deliberation, policymaking, and lawmaking, have been overshadowed by those functions that are useful to individual members. The fate of the individual member depends upon the capacity of the legislator to represent the interests of electorally decisive minorities within the district.
Increasingly, this is possible through the member's ability to intervene in the administrative process. It is not accidental that the growth of congressional staff has coincided with the changing role of the legislator. As congressmen operate as individual entrepreneurs, staff serve to facilitate the function of ombudsmen. Furthermore, it has become difficult to
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