Future of Constituent Engagement

Exploring the post-mail landscape

Looking Ahead

The current system of high-volume communication between constituents and Congress is fundamentally broken. What comes next?

The last fifteen years have seen the increasing distortion and accelerating decay of the old systems of mail-based communication between elected legislatures and constituents. POPVOX Foundation works with legislative offices, support institutions, civil society, academics, and tech innovators to explore the future landscape of two-way engagement between representatives and constituents.

Documenting Innovative Methods

Mail and phones occupy an outsized role in how many legislators and reformers think about constituent interactions, but they are only a tiny fraction of the spectrum of methods and tools elected legislators use to communicate with their constituents. In Congress alone, offices expend considerable resources on other types of engagement, 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. These often-overlooked interactions hold important lessons about what matters and what works for Congress’ interactions with constituents today and into the future.

POPVOX Foundation works to explore and document the full landscape of how elected legislators in the US and abroad are already employing innovative and deliberative methods to engage constituents. These methods go beyond the “usual suspects” of at-scale communication like mail, phones, and town halls to encompass smaller-scale, long-term, deliberative relationships between elected legislators and local stakeholders and constituents.

  • Casework Navigator

    Webinars, workshops, resources, and research on the state of casework today, and the future of constituent service in a landscape of rapidly-evolving technology and expectations of government

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  • Report: Assessing Member Office Implementation and Uptake of Member-Directed Spending Programs

    A look at how Members message Member-directed spending programs program to their constituents

    Read

  • Empowered Engagement

    A project to help funders, stakeholders, and individuals better understand the regulatory process and how/why to engage through public comment periods and in response to formal requests for information

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  • What’s happening with AI in constituent engagement?

    Outdated communication systems and limited office adoption have minimized GenAI's impact on constituent engagement, but there remains a need to rethink and modernize how constituents and lawmakers interact.

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Connecting Tech Innovations to Legislators

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. Other experiments and pilot projects from democracies around the world have additional insight to potentially strengthen US constituent-legislator engagement.

POPVOX Foundation works to make this landscape of technologies and approaches legible to legislative offices in the US, with research, writing, and recommendations for facilitating their implementation.

  • Medium: Making Laws WITH the People

    A roadmap for committees and lawmakers who want to provide more opportunities for public input and collaboration throughout the legislative process

    Read

  • Newsletter: Using Generative AI for Casework Good

    For caseworkers, GenAI has the potential to fundamentally shift some of the current ways that federal agencies operate, and how constituents interact with them.

    Read

Congress 2076

Congress 2076 is a forward-looking initiative designed to reimagine the United States Congress on the occasion of its 300th anniversary in 2076. This project invites experts from various fields, including government, technology, and academia, to contribute their visions for a responsive, effective, and representative legislative body. This Congress-specific effort hosted by POPVOX Foundation builds on the work of Democracy 2076.

  • Congress 2076 Workshop

    May 13, 2024

    The Congress 2076 workshop will bring together Congress scholars and champions to share ideas and envision a Congress that is resilient, responsive, and effective for America’s tercentennial.

    Learn More / RSVP

  • Democracy 2076

    Democracy 2076 seeks to imagine and develop democracy that is effective and responsive for the next generation as well as representative and resilient.

    Learn More

Additional Resources

Research, writing, and events on the Future of Constituent Engagement from POPVOX Foundation and collaborators.

  • Announcing the Future of Constituent Engagement Project from POPVOX Foundation

    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.

    Read

  • CivX Toolkit

    Led by researcher Samantha McDonald, Ph.D., POPVOX Foundation is working to develop an open source “Civic Experience Metrics” that can be used as an apples-to-apples metric for future government or civil society projects.

    Learn More

  • Next City: It’s Not Just Roads and Bridges: Our “Civic Infrastructure” is Crumbling, and Here’s How to Fix It

    Our “civic infrastructure” is depleted, underfunded, and inadequate for a 21st-century democracy.

    Read