How Congress Turns Citizens' Voices into Data Points

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By Samantha McDonald ,
The Conversation

| September 16, 2019

No matter why or how people contact their elected officials, they all want one basic thing: They want someone to listen.

Big technology companies like Amazon, Facebook and Google aren’t the only ones facing huge political concerns about using citizen data: So is Congress. Reports by congressional researchers over the last decade describe an outdated communication system that is struggling to address an overwhelming rise in citizen contact.

Every day, thousands of people contact their senators and representatives. Their intentions—protesting or supporting a politician or legislative proposal, seeking assistance with the federal bureaucracy or expressing their opinions about current affairs—vary as widely as their means of communication, which include phones, written letters, emails, in-person meetings, town halls, faxes and social media messages.

The Congressional Management Foundation suggests that most congressional offices saw constituent contact double—or even increase eight-fold—from 2002 to 2010. Current staffers say the numbers have climbed even higher since then. Congressional staffers spend hours listening, reading, collecting and organizing all this information. All of it ends up going into databases in their offices.

As a scholar of technology use in Congress, I’ve interviewed more than 50 staffers in more than 40 congressional offices. I’ve observed that advancements in computer technology are changing how Congress handles citizen communication and uses the data collected from those conversations to represent citizens—for better and for worse.

An Overloaded System

No matter why or how people contact their elected officials, they all want one basic thing: They want someone to listen. But what actually happens is something different. As one staffer explained to me: “They want their voices to be heard, and it’s me entering their info into a database.”

When a constituent calls a congressional office, the staff member answering the phone collects personal information—the caller’s name, their address and why they’re calling. The address is important, because it can confirm the person is actually a resident of the congressional district. Congress has been logging this sort of data for decades, but the number of constituents seeking to contact their elected representatives has grown immensely and is overwhelming congressional systems.

For example, one democratic staffer told me that in 2017, as Republicans took up efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, often known as Obamacare, their office received 200 phone calls a day—with only one intern answering the phone. The only way to handle so many calls was to tally people’s views as “for” or “against” the current proposal. There was no time to track anything else. This is the new normal for Congress—which is understaffed and underprepared to substantively listen.

Focusing on Numbers, Not People

Too much attention to data can cause problems in a representative democracy. Each representative has an average of 710,000 constituents—so aggregating and tallying views of citizens can be an attractive solution. But each of those people has their own story. With staffers’ focus on collecting data, the emotional stories that drive citizens to speak up are often lost.

Imagine a caller contacting their member of Congress about the ACA who has an overall view of the bill, but also has a personal connection to one of its details—such as a college-age child who might lose coverage, or a preexisting medical condition.

More often than not, that caller’s opinion will end up labeled as either “for” or “against” the whole bill—not, for instance, “against” this part of it, but “for” that part of it. The problem isn’t that members of Congress and their staffs don’t care – they care quite a lot—it’s that they don’t have the capacity to truly listen.

By turning contact from citizens into data points, Congress reduces what it can learn about its constituents and what they want. But this contact is important. It is the single most consistent predictor of which constituents policymakers pay attention to in their district—putting issues on the radar for the future. Data changes those perceptions, by emphasizing the numbers as an efficient means of understanding.

Further Complications

The databases not only oversimplify constituents’ views—they leave out large groups of Americans.

More often than not, the people who contact their members of Congress are white, educated and wealthy. The database information is easy to analyze, so it’s tempting to assume it accurately represents wider public opinion. But it doesn’t.

There are also other major concerns. Many of these databases are designed based on business practices, making Congress treat citizens more like customers to satisfy than collaborators in policymaking.

This is causing staff roles to change from gatekeepers of citizen voices to underpaid database administrators and customer relations personnel. Staff spend hours, and sometime days, logging, organizing and tracking citizen information for the database. This is a huge amount of time and labor that could be better utilized elsewhere to understand constituent views.

As the practices of collecting and logging citizen contact continues to grow, Congress needs to think critically about what this data and these data collection practices are doing to representatives’ relationships with citizens. Citizens will have limited ability to influence policymakers without such critical conversations.

Technology doesn’t change the political realities of what is already happening in Congress, but it often reinforces and amplifies what is already happening in society.

Changing how Congress uses and tracks citizen data needs to be connected to larger conversations about what it means for the government to listen to constituents and involve them in policymaking. This can drive innovative technology that promotes higher-quality forms of

Samantha McDonald is a Ph.D. candidate in informatics at the University of California, Irvine.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

NEXT STORY: I Won’t Buy My Teenagers Smartphones

I Won’t Buy My Teenagers Smartphones

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By Sarah P. Weeldreyer,
The Atlantic

| September 14, 2019

Denying a teen a smartphone in 2019 is a tough decision, and one that requires an organized and impenetrable defense.

My 14-year-old son just started high school, and he does not have his own smartphone. When I tell people this, I get the same face I imagine I would if I said that I hadn’t fed him for several days. My son is fine, though—really. I don’t think he’s ever been lost, stranded, or even inconvenienced by his lack of that quintessential 21st-century accessory.

My son and his brother, one year his junior, are not living in the Dark Ages. They each have a tablet, loaded with a souped-up internet filter and time restrictions, that they use at home. My boys are not like the kid I met in college who had grown up without TV and didn’t appreciate the cultural relevancy of Bo and Luke Duke or George Jefferson. My kids readily quote Ron Swanson and Dwight Shrute. They text, they Snap—but only on weekends and a little bit this past summer. What sets them apart from most of their friends is that neither of them owns a portable device connected to the internet that can be hidden in the depths of their baggy Under Armour shorts.

Now that my oldest is in ninth grade, it occurs to me that this decision not to buy him the one thing that every other kid has might be the most subversive, countercultural gesture of my entire life. I’m a total conformist. I follow the rules. I return my library books on time or pay the fine. My husband is a captain in the Navy—certainly not countercultural. As soon as the first baby came along, we bought a minivan. We’ve never been out there trying to make any bold statements. And yet, when it comes to allowing my teenagers access to smartphones, I am apparently a rebel. Is resisting this ubiquitous technology really worth it?

For me, it is. I believe that a smartphone too accessible, given too early, and in the wrong hands is at best an addictive distraction and at worst a handheld siphon draining away children’s youth one beep, one swipe, one notification at a time.

The smartphone delay in our house started long before the devices were as prevalent as they are today, and at the time it was more an omission than an act of resistance. When our boys were babies and toddlers, we heeded the advice of pediatricians and child-development experts who warned against too much TV for young children. We watched the PBS morning lineup and Disney movies, but that was the extent of our screen time. Then, in 2009, when my oldest was 5, my dad gave us a book by Richard Louv called Last Child in the Woods. The thesis left an impression on us. Louv asserts that children suffer from “nature-deficit disorder” when they don’t spend enough time under the sky among other living creatures. Already in the habit of limiting our kids’ screen time, it was natural to delay buying them electronics. We relented with the purchase of tablets, mainly for use during our frequent trips to visit faraway family, but we never graduated to smaller, more portable devices. We wanted our children to spend their time playing outside. And reading books. And talking with us. So we never bought them phones. They kept getting older, and we kept not buying them phones. Now that they are in middle and high school, I realize that their childhood has been somewhat different from their friends’—and also remarkably different from mine.

In middle school in the 1980s, my friends and I whiled away our free time unsupervised at the skating rink, the mall, and the arcade. In high school, we graduated to more secluded places where we could park, turn up the music, and hang out unseen by prying, parental eyes. Even the most undesirable place, a vacant lot underneath an interstate overpass, was a haven as long as your friends were there. Now, a mere 30 years later, the skating rinks and arcades are closed, and my kids’ lives bear little resemblance to those of my childhood friends and myself.

In The Atlantic, Jean M. Twenge discussed her 25-year study of generational differences in the United States. She found that how today’s teenagers spend their time is immensely different from how every preceding generation of teens back to the Baby Boomers spent theirs, and all evidence of cause points to the emergence of the smartphone and the birth of social media. Teenagers today are more likely to be at home, connected to the world via Wi-Fi. Yet at the same time, they are more likely to feel isolated and unhappy. Twenge writes, “The number of teens who get together with their friends nearly every day dropped by more than 40 percent from 2000 to 2015.” Ironically, the technology that promises to connect us all is also leaving us more alienated.

Twenge’s findings about today’s kids are not all bad. Teens smoke and drink less than their parents and grandparents did at the same age, and they are less likely to be in a car accident, which is great. More worrisome is that they are less likely than their parents were to date, and that they are less interested in learning to drive, despite the freedom and independence that comes with a driver’s license. With the internet, as Twenge points out, “they don’t need to leave home to spend time with their friends.”

But they’re not really spending time with their friends, are they? When I tell my friends that my teenagers don’t have phones of their own, I’m often asked if I’m worried about them missing out on a social life. When did sitting at home isolated by closed doors and earbuds become a social life? As a culture, we’re providing our kids with these devices so that they don’t miss out on a virtual life, but what they give up in exchange is a real life. If teenagers were using their phones primarily to make plans to gather and hang out, that would be one thing. But often, Twenge’s research suggests, use of the smartphone has become the end unto itself. Many kids seem more interested in maintaining their “Snapstreaks” than in getting on a bike and riding over to a friend’s house.

Recently, after being with his friends, one of my boys came home with the slouched shoulders and shuffling gait characteristic of an unhappy teenager. Someone in the group had a sparkling new iPhone X. “It’s pretty cool,” he said with a dejected expression. Like most moms, I hate seeing my kids sad. We talked for a bit, and he sheepishly admitted, “I know I don’t need one, Mom. I just want one.” I think my boys feel the same way about smartphones that I felt about Guess jeans—the ones with zippers at the ankles—in 1984. All the cool, pretty girls had a pair. My desire for the jeans was more about fitting in with the crowd than about the jeans themselves.

Like the answer to many parenting questions, the answer to whether a child can handle a smartphone likely depends on the temperament and maturity of the child. I don’t want to disparage my beloved firstborn. He is currently training with his dad to run the Marine Corps Marathon in the fall. He’s a good student and an accomplished trumpet player. That said, his judgment often indicates that his frontal lobe is still developing. He would eat an entire bag of Nacho Cheese Doritos—the party-size bag—if left alone with the opportunity. He has matured somewhat in the months between eighth and ninth grade, but he often exhibits the attention span of a squirrel. This is a boy with hopes and dreams for his future, and the intellectual ability to achieve them. My husband and I believe that giving him his own smartphone at this point would be akin to buying him a carton of cigarettes and a subscription to Playboy and wishing him good luck staying focused in high school.

Though we may be in the minority (at least in our community), we’re not alone in our concern. The Wait Until 8th movement, for example, encourages parents of kids at the same school to band together to pledge not to give their children smartphones until at least eighth grade. In one high-profile example, Madonna recently said, “I made a mistake when I gave my older children phones when they were 13.” My husband and I, the ’80s kids that we are, felt validated when we read this. Even the Material Girl, the rebel of our generation, views the smartphone as a negative influence. As a society, we acknowledge that certain privileges, such as driving and voting, come with maturity. Maybe smartphones should be another such privilege. There will come a day when our sons are ready to use the smartphone for the purpose for which it is intended—as a communication tool to help them conduct their lives. For now, it is an expensive and distracting toy.

I don’t judge other parents for making a different choice. The question of how much tech to allow into our children’s lives and when is one of the biggest parenting challenges of the current era. Denying a teenager a smartphone in 2019 is a tough decision, and one that requires an organized and impenetrable defense. Today’s kids are smart, and they will present an almost airtight case for why they need a phone. Thankfully, academics such as Twenge are providing material for our cross-examination.

If you are a parent who’s struggling to hold strong against the inexorable pull of the smartphone, I’m here to tell you that it’s possible. If you’re late to pick your kids up from soccer practice, they can wait and wonder where you are for a few minutes. Patience is a virtue. If they have to borrow your phone to check the Nats’ score or ask a friend about homework, they will live—hopefully a real life rather than a virtual one.

NEXT STORY: 9 Tips to Help Secure Every Federal Employee’s Mobile Device