Announcing the Future of Constituent Engagement Project from POPVOX Foundation

If AI-generated fake constituent input is the final accelerant on the bonfire of the old system of public engagement with Congress, then what comes out of the ashes?

The last fifteen years have seen the increasing distortion and accelerating decay of the old systems of mail-based communication between Congress and constituents. Systems intended to batch constituent input through mail, phone, or email into easy-to-parse issue-based categories and generate quick responses to meet “customer service” demands fall apart when Congressional offices can no longer easily tell the difference between real and false inputs — and these systems already play a relatively outsized role in absorbing Congressional capacity while contributing little meaningful input to policymaking. While most studies on declining trust in democracy focus on constituent trust in government institutions, the increasing prevalence of AI-generated input also erodes lawmakers’ trust in their constituents — further de-incentivizing Members to devote significant staff time and effort to constituent engagement and response through existing channels.

While it may continue to persist in a diminished form, the current system of mediating high-volume communication between constituents and Congress is fundamentally broken.

However, the spirit of American civic innovation is also alive and well: individual Congressional offices, as well as multiple groups and organizations across the country are experimenting with new ways to structure interactions between Congress and constituents and reinvigorate civic participation at the federal level. These approaches run from integrating new and emerging technologies to redesigning older methods of interacting with constituents, and critically assessing the entire ecosystem of civic engagement from civic education to policy implementation. These new experiments, as well as other methods of Congressional interactions with constituents — including casework, military service academy nominations, student activations like the Congressional App Challenge and the Congressional Art Competition, internships, the newly-reformed Congressionally-directed spending program, and more — have important lessons about what matters and what works for Congress’ interactions with constituents today and into the future. Other experiments and pilot projects from democracies around the world have additional insight to potentially strengthen US constituent-legislator engagement.

The Future of Constituent Engagement project from POPVOX Foundation intends to provide constituents, elected legislators, and innovators with key questions and inputs to consider in navigating the post-mail future, focusing on three directional waypoints:

1. What is “meaningful” constituent-legislator interaction when AI enables the automation of tasks that were previously considered “public engagement?” In other words, what really matters in interactions between constituents and legislators/staff?

Congress is not just a machine that makes policy: Members and staff play complex, nuanced roles in their communities across widely different settings and expectations. For example, a Member office might play an important convening role bringing together harbormasters or police chiefs, and a validating, witnessing role in a Vietnam veteran pinning ceremony. Interns answering the phones play a customer service role, but also meet a genuine need for connection for many constituents calling Congress. Negotiations over the relative value of these different constituent-facing roles in Congressional offices take place daily in both allocation of staff time and attention as well as the careful management of the Member’s time and travel.

As AI automates significant elements of constituent-facing tasks, ideally freeing up staff and Member capacity, Congressional offices will have to ask questions about what types of interaction matter most — and which matter most to constituents, stakeholders, and the office’s effectiveness.

2. What does the shift from mail mean for the allocation of labor and responsibilities within Congressional offices?

Congressional offices are currently structured around a zero-sum equation of capacity: the more time spent on constituent interactions, the less time available for policy. If new and emerging technologies mean that mail-based interaction takes up an increasingly smaller share of capacity, how should Congress think about redeploying that capacity to better solicit and integrate constituent input into the legislative process? How do (or could) current silos between constituent-facing and policy-oriented labor start to fall? What technologies and tools can Congress and other legislative offices use to develop and maintain the capacity for new constituent engagements?

3. What new methods of constituent-legislator interactions will emerge, and what design choices and assumptions will shape those ongoing relationships?

Current technology platforms deployed in Congressional offices to manage the flow of constituent communication are predicated on certain assumptions about how constituents and legislators interact — which, when built into the design of these programs, shape future interactions. New methods of interaction, in addition to taking advantage of emerging technologies, have the opportunity to identify and question past assumptions about best practices for civic interaction, and to optimize for new and different elements in mediating interactions between Congress and constituents.

To answer these questions, POPVOX Foundation will be embarking on research, convening, and prototyping activities around constituent engagement.

Questions, or want to participate? We’d love to hear from you! Shoot us an email at info@popvox.org or visit popvox.org/future to learn more.