Question

1. Can we be adequately represented in Congress by someone who is a different gender, race, religion, or socioeconomic status?

Please write a 350-500 word response.

Answer 1

The tension between local and national politics described in the previous section is essentially a struggle between interpretations of representation. Representation is a complax concept. It can mean playing careful attention to the concerns of constituents, understanding that representatives must act as they see fit based on what they feel best for the constituency, or relying on the particular ethnic, racial, or gender diversity of those in office. In this action, we will explore three different models of representation. we will look at the way members of congress navigate the challenging terrain of representation as they serve, and all the many predictable and unpredictable consequences of the decisions they make.

Types of representation: Looking Out for Constituents

By definition and title, senators and House members are representatives. These means they are intended to be drawn from local populations around the country so they can speak for and make decisions for those local populations, their constituents, will serving in their respective legislative houses. That is, representation refers to an elected leader's looking out out for his or her constituents while carrying out the duties of the office.

Theoretically, the process of constituents voting regularly and reaching out of their representatives help these congresspersons better represent them. It is considered a given by some in representative democracies that representatives will seldom ignore the wishes of constituents, especially on salient issues that directly affect the district or state. In reality, the job of representing in congress is often quite complicated, and elected leaders do not always now where there constituents stand. Navigating their sometimes contradictory demands and balancing them with the demands of the party, powerfull interest groups, ideological concerns, the legislative body, their own personal beliefs, and the country as a whole can be a complicated and frustrating process for representatives.

For example, every representative, regardless of party or conservative versus liberal leaninges must remain firm in support of some idologies and resistant to others, on the political right, an issue that demands support might be gun rights; on the left, it might be a woman's right to an abortion. For votes related to such issues, representatives will likely pursue a delegate approach. For other issues, especially complax questions the public at large has little patience for , such as subtle economic reforms, representatives will tend to follow a trustee approach. This is not to say their decisions on this issues run contrary to public opinion. Rather, it merely means they are not acutely aware of or cannot adequately measure the extent to which their constituents support or reject the proposals at hand. It could also mean that the issue is not salient to their constituents. Congress works on hundreds of different issues each year, and constituents are likely not aware of the particulars of most of them.

Descriptive Representation in congress

In some case, representation can seem to have very little to do with the substantive issues representatives in congress tend to debate. Instead, proper representation for some is rooted in the racial, ethninc, socioeconomic, gender, and sexual identity of the representatives themselves. this from of representation is called descriptive representation.

At one time, there was relatively little concern about descriptive representation in congress. A major reason is that until well into the twentieth century, while men of European background constituted an overwhelming majority of the voting population.African Americans were routinely deprived of the opportunity to participate in democracy, and Hispanics and other minority groups were fairly incignificant in number and excluded by the states. While woman in many western states could vote sooner, all woman were not able to exercise their right to vote nationwide until passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, and they began to make up more then 5 percent of ether chamber only in the 1990s.

In recent decades, congress has become much more diescriptively representative of the United States. The 114th congress, which began in january 2015, had a historicallyu large percentage of racial and ethnic minorities. African Americans made up the largest percentage, with forty-eight members,while Latinos accounted for thirty-two members,up from nineteen just over a decade before.

Yet, demographically speaking, congess as a hole is still a long way from where the country is and remains largely white, male, and wealthy. For example, al though more than half the U.S. population is female, only 20 percent of congress is. Congress is also overwhelmingly Christian.