I’ve been thinking a lot lately about representation. And how it’s changing. In particular, I’ve been thinking about how the modern communications environment — social media, the blogs, twitter, and so on — has changed the representational contexts for Members of the House, and consequentially their representational capacities and strategies.

Much of this is still congealing in my head, but here are five tentative observations:

1) The opportunities for surrogate representation have increased dramatically. In her excellent APSR article, Jane Mansbridge defines surrogate representation as happening when Members represent constituents outside their district. In the traditional formulation, this often happens around specific issues with dispersed national constituencies: Dennis Kucinich representing anti-war advocates, Barney Frank representing gay rights advocates, and so forth. My sense is that, twenty years ago, very few Members were engaged in such surrogate activities. They simply did not have the resource capacity. Members were (and still are) barred from sending franked postal mail outside of their districts. The only way to get a national audience was to get on TV — which usually meant having at least the power of a committee chair, or doing something extraordinarily provocative. And it would have been crazy to suggest spending any significant portion of campaign money on outside-the-district activities.

Today, the entire playing field has been rearranged. Even backbench Members can seek a national followings with relative ease, and at virtually no cost. The Internet, and in particular the social media application like Twitter, Youtube, and Facebook, have zero marginal cost. One can stake out an issue, make a concerted effort to become a national leader on the issue, and have some chance of success, all without expending pretty much any marginal resources. The upside is clear: national leadership on issue means a higher political profile both inside and outside the House, more campaign fundraising opportunities, and (lest we forget) greater opportunity to influence public policy. My sense is that Members are beginning to alter their representational strategies around these facts: connecting themselves to national movements, inserting themselves into national policy debates more often, and modifying their fundraising strategies to more optimistically look for out-of-district money. And the more that Members engage in surrogate representation, the less they engage in traditional district representation.

2) But so has the pressure to nationalize your representation. One consequence I see to this increased capacity for nationalizing your representation is that the very existence of the possibility has coincided with at least some necessity of doing so, even if you don’t want to. Member communications used to be pretty simple. For example, back in the 90s, when I was a lowly intern in a House Member’s office, the sorting procedure for the incoming mail was pretty simple: if it was from our district, put it in the priority pile. If it was from outside the district, determine whether it was personal mail from a constituent. If it was, put it in another pile so that we could direct it to the correct office. If it was from outside the district and not personal constituent mail, throw it away.

Now? Even if Members would prefer only to interact with their electoral constituents, it’s not possible.  The volume of email and other electronic communications coming into the House is dwarfing traditional mail, and there’s no quick way to tell if it’s coming from your district or not. Which means that the information context Members are facing in their offices is much more national in scope, even after they’ve tried to filter it. This has consequences. For one, it forces a complete rethinking of an office communications strategy. But it also distorts one’s perspective of district opinion, and tends to orient Members toward national public policy; people from outside the district are much more likely to communicate about policy issues than distributive politics such as grants or earmarks.

But it goes deeper than this. Electoral challengers are nationalizing their representation, too. Why wouldn’t they? If a Twitter townhall  focused on a national issue or a viral youtube clip can expand your potential fundraising base, get your name in faraway papers, and maybe get you invited onto a cable news show, there’s almost no incentive not to do it. Add on that nationalizing a challenger campaign can create an army of psuedo-activists to target the incumbent and its a no-brainer. And thus Members choosing not to undertake a new media strategy are at a serious disadvantage. And pretty much any new media strategy is inherently a nationalized strategy from a infrastructure perspective.

3) Such trends would be in conflict with the basic electoral logic and Fenno-esque model of constituent relations. Certain things have not changed. The most important, of course, is that only people in the district can vote. But there are other important things too: district offices have to be in the district, franked mail still can only go to the distict, and so forth. So the electoral connection, and most of the resources available to maintain it, are still tied squarely to the district. And this means that Members will always be tied, first and foremost, to the district. The largest Fenno constitency that the Member sees — the geographic constituency — still rules. But it may not be the largest constituency the Member sees anymore when he looks bak home from Washington. The national constitunecy may now enter his or her thinking — whether he wants it or not; whether he knows it or not — in a way that fundamentally rearranges the lens through which he sees his district.

This has potential implications. The most important thing that comes to mind is that the Member may greater incentives now than ever to try and shape his district in a more national mold. This would be akin to Mansbridge’s idea of “educating” the constituency under an anticipatory representation model. But it might just be a Member choosing to frame issues in the district in a national way, or choosing to emphasize national over local issues when communicating to the district.

4) But the constituents themselves may be nationalizing. Nationalizing their representational profile, of course, is also potentially dangerous from a Member perpsective. As Mayhew writes in The Electoral Connection, Members treat national partisan or ideological swings as acts of god that they can’t control; they instead focus on what they can control, mostly district-related things. To tie one’s fortunes to the national party is to place one’s future in someone else’s hands. But this may dovetail with what is happening to constituents: it’s not crazy to suggest that voters themselves are nationalizing as well. And if that’s the case, then Members may be forced into a national representational context, one that affords them less safety from trends they cannot contorl.

5) I think this may be playing a part in the recent trend of nationalized House elections. 2006, 2008, and 2010 were all House elections in which national politics was said to play an unusually big role, at least in comparison to the conventional wisdom about House elections and the local/national divide. There are all sorts of hypotheses that we can come up with to explain this. But one is simply that voters, challengers, and Members are all themselves more embedded into a national political culture, in no small part because of the information firehouse and the communications technology. Thay may be a consequecne of other trends — such as ideological sorting of the parties — but it also may be a constitutive cause of such trends. Or both. It’s obviously far too small a sample to definitively say that old-school local House elections are a dying breed, but at this point I wouldn’t bet against it without some odds.