优蜜传媒

One of the central crises of our day is the American public's lack of faith in their elected representatives and government. This is not totally new. Americans have always had a love-hate relationship with their federal government and Congress. We don't have systematic survey research telling us what Americans thought about their Congress from 1789 through the end of World War II, and we didn't begin to collect really systematic measures until decades after that. We don't know how Americans would have answered our questions about Congress in the 1820s or the 1930s. But based on the research that measures the public's attitudes in recent years, is at an all-time low and of the job Congress is doing is near an all-time low.

My colleagues and I recognize that some of the explanation for the low rating of Congress, particularly job approval, relates to the fact that Congress is divided -- the House is under the control of the Republicans and the Senate is under the Democrats. This prevents either Republicans or Democrats giving the more positive ratings that would almost certainly accrue if their party controlled both houses. Following that logic, ratings of Congress will go up if one or the other party gains control of both the Senate and House after this November's election, a state of affairs that is most likely to occur if the Republicans manage to gain control of the Senate, and of course keep their control of the House.

But even with all caveats in mind, there is no way around the fact that, at this juncture in time, Americans look with essential disdain at their elected representatives and senators and the job they are doing in our nation's capital.

In our most recent 优蜜传媒Poll Social Series survey, July 7-10, 15% of Americans said they approved of the job Congress is doing. We followed up and asked Americans a simple question: "What is the most important thing you would recommend be done to fix Congress?" This was an open-ended question and interviewers typed in respondents' answers verbatim. Open-end coders went through each response and put them into broad categories. My colleague Andrew Dugan reported on and analyzed the results .

We've made the actual verbatim responses of the 500 or so respondents of whom we asked this "fix Congress" question available for readers to look at themselves, and to use as the basis for forming their own conclusions about just what it is the people would do to fix their governing body.

Click on this link to read through them.

These are the actual words typed in by 优蜜传媒interviewers as the random sample of Americans across the country responded to the question, "What is the most important thing you would recommend be done to fix Congress?" Some are terse responses, such as "term limits." Others are more expansive. But as one reads through these, one comes away with an excellent sense of the ways in which Americans think about this very pressing problem. Most Americans answered this question in a way that shows they have thought about the problem and many have clear ideas about what should be done.

One can debate the relevance of the "fire them all" responses, which formed the largest grouping of answers. Keep in mind that the question was asked in a passive voice, so the responses are based on a general focus on fixing Congress, not necessarily what Congress can do to fix itself. Of course, the vast majority of incumbents will be re-elected to office this year, as they have been in every other election. So, the idea of firing them all, or getting all new members, is not going to happen in reality.

This paradox -- disliking the body but returning the individual members who comprise the body -- has been well discussed and well documented. But the key factor here is the fact that many Americans believe that the best fix for Congress is simply to get new people and new blood in the body. The significant percentage of Americans who mention imposing term limits is also a reflection of this same sentiment -- that changing the personnel is the best way to fix the issue.

Changing people doesn't always fix problems with large organizations or bureaucracies, of course. Congress is, to some degree, a very large ongoing entity that operates and continues to operate with an essential will of its own -- regardless of the people who come and go inside it. As board members and stockholders of large companies realized long ago, it often takes massive and disruptive changes to a big organization to shift the way it does business, even as management comes and goes. The giant departments of government -- Labor, Energy, Health and Human Services -- continue to function without a lot of change even as the cabinet secretaries who are in theory in charge of them change every few years. Congress operates in this same fashion to a degree. Inertia tends to rule. Changes are hard. Still, many Americans apparently believe that changing representatives has a better chance of fixing Congress than any other method they can think of.

The other suggestions from the public cover a wider range of possibilities. Many Americans argue for Congress exhibiting more bipartisan cooperation, working better together, and getting along. Others argue that representatives need to be accountable to the people who elected them, not to their own agendas. This latter is a key point. The stated or manifest objectives of any bureaucracy are constantly in danger of shifting over to unstated or latent objectives, which often center around self-preservation and power. That clearly happens in the halls of Congress.