Most Americans think Congress is doing a poor job ↗︎. They’re not wrong. By one measure ↗︎, about half of the policy areas Congress addressed from 2006-2022 resulted in “representational failures,” meaning legislation passed or failed against majority opinion. Congress does not optimally represent voters’ policy preferences.
In contrast to popular belief, though, ideologically extreme representatives aren’t to blame. It’s tempting to think that replacing liberal and conservative incumbents with moderates would lead Congress to pass more broadly popular policy, since that would mean voters have a chance to significantly improve Congress every two years. Unfortunately, there’s no evidence that would work. In most districts, a moderate would actually be less aligned with voters on issues ↗︎ than a liberal or conservative. And in the Capitol, moderates would be subject to the same partisan incentives ↗︎ that currently create gridlock.
Advocates for ranked-choice voting ↗︎ and nonpartisan primaries ↗︎ (or a bundle of the two known as “top four” ↗︎ or “top five” voting) claim that the electoral status quo bolsters extreme candidates ↗︎, and that their reforms would give moderates a fighting chance. The jury’s still out on this assertion, but it’s not really worth quibbling over. Even if RCV and nonpartisan primaries gave moderates an edge, it would neither improve the alignment between representatives and their districts nor lead Congress to pass more policy. If reformers want to improve Congressional representation, RCV and nonpartisan primaries aren’t a good bet.
The primary job of a member of Congress is to represent their constituents’ interests. If a majority of constituents in a district prefer policy A over B, their representative should vote for policy A. That’s the premise of representative democracy.
The idea that members of Congress are too extreme therefore implies that they support policies that are more extreme than their constituents want. If a majority of constituents want middle-of-the-road policies and their legislator supports extremely liberal or conservative policies, that’s a representational failure. Likewise, if a majority of constituents want a liberal policy on a given issue and their representative votes in a conservative direction (or vice versa), that’s a failure. It turns out that these types of failures are rare.
On a typical issue about 18% of voters ↗︎ support a policy in between the major parties’ positions—a “moderate” or centrist position. That’s not to say 18% of voters are centrist on every issue, though. Instead, the moderate preference is often a one-off; the 18% are equally likely to have liberal, conservative or mixed preferences across other issues.
The best word to describe most voters is “idiosyncratic.” They aren’t consistent moderates ↗︎, but they aren’t consistent liberals ↗︎ or conservatives either ↗︎.$\sf ^1$ Only about 14% of voters ↗︎ have issue preferences that are ideologically consistent, while a much larger share—about 42% ↗︎—support an idiosyncratic mix of liberal, conservative and centrist preferences across issues.$\sf ^2$ Voters with idiosyncratic beliefs are often mistaken for moderates, since someone who supports one conservative policy (+1) and one liberal policy (-1) has an average policy position in the middle of the scale (0). This ideological score doesn’t indicate support for centrist policy, though. In many cases, it just means two extreme positions have cancelled each other out.
It’s true that representatives are more ideologically consistent than voters: most Democrats in Congress consistently vote on the liberal side of issues, and most Republicans on the conservative side, and this has become more true over time. But first of all, party-line voting doesn’t necessarily indicate that a legislator is extreme. It’s hard to infer true ideology from roll-call votes, since, for example, one member might vote “no” on a spending bill because it’s too small while another votes “no” because it’s too large ↗︎. And secondly, regardless of legislators’ sincere beliefs their votes generally line up with what their constituents want.
Members of Congress already vote with the majority of their constituents on the vast majority of issues ↗︎.
When voters’ preferences are aggregated at the district level it creates a “delegate paradox ↗︎,” wherein the best representative for most districts is a legislator who consistently votes on the left or right side of issues.
To illustrate the paradox, imagine a district where voters are slightly left of center, on average. Across five issues, a typical voter takes a liberal position on three.
Adapted from Ahler & Broockman 2018, Table 1.
To perfectly represent any given constituent’s preferences, the district’s representative would need to vote in a liberal direction on three issues, too. The trouble is that each voter is liberal on a different set of three issues. For example, Voter A is liberal on Issue 1 and conservative on Issue 4, while Voter B is conservative on Issue 1 and liberal on Issue 4. If the district’s representative perfectly mirrors Voter A, they’ll disappoint Voter B. The representative can’t possibly satisfy every individual voter.
Given voters with idiosyncratic preferences, the best a representative can do is to vote with public opinion on each issue. If a majority of voters are liberal on Issue 1, the representative should take a liberal position on Issue 1, and so on. In our stylized example, this logic leads the ideal representative to take a liberal position on all five issues. The representative ends up looking more liberal than their constituents, but is representing them as well as possible.
Replacing liberal or conservative incumbents with moderate challengers would actually worsen issue representation ↗︎ in the nearly every House district. On some level, voters seem to know it: while they overwhelmingly disapprove of Congress, most voters think their own representative deserves to be reelected ↗︎.