Issue representation refers to the degree to which representatives vote in line with public opinion.

At the district level, Americans are about as well-represented on the issues by their member of Congress as possible given that each district is only represented by one person. Representatives vote in line with majority opinion in their districts on most major issues (Clinton et al 2023; Kuriwaki and Ansolabehere 2025) and voters hold them accountable when they don’t (Ansolabehere and Kuriwaki 2022). Members of Congress tend to vote with their party in a consistently liberal or conservative direction, which can make them look more ideologically extreme than constituents who hold a mix of liberal, conservative and centrist views (Broockman 2016; Broockman and Lauderdale 2024). But paradoxically, in most districts party-line voting is the best way to represent constituents’ idiosyncratic preferences (Ahler and Broockman 2018).

However, issue representation suffers at the national level. From 2006 to 2022, Congress failed to represent majority public opinion in roughly half of the policy areas it addressed. Among these failures, popular policies are far more likely to be blocked than unpopular ones passed. For example, only 55% of policies supported by a majority of voters—both within the majority party and across the country—succeed in the Senate (Kuriwaki and Ansolabehere 2025).