ABSTRACT
The aspiration that guides the benchmarks appraised in this chapter is a robust representative democracy. Congress must be sensitive and responsive to public opinion as it attempts to solve societal problems and designs policy to promote the national interest. The effort to create such a benchmark faces two significant challenges, however. First, it is hard to measure the sensitivity of many national legislative bodies to changes in public opinion. The second problem is that we do not really have systematic and reliable public opinion data from before World War II. To provide more systematic and comprehensive data consistent with the basic argument that Congress responds to election results. The chapter explores whether the legislature tracks the views of Americans as they are expressed in a less formal but more frequent manner outside elections. Members of Congress have a rich variety of occupational backgrounds, life experiences, and religious affiliations.
