Nothing  — and I mean nothing — better captures the DC chattering class at its speculative worst than the Veepstakes. And that’s saying something. It’s not just that most of the speculation is baseless. And it’s not that most of it is utterly inane. It’s that, from an electoral standpoint, it just doesn’t matter. As I’ve mused about before, it’s entirely possible that the effects of VP selection on the election outcome is normally zero, except in cases of extreme blunder. As is the case with so many things like this, the best places to read about the Veepstakes are at the political science blogs, where the Veepstakes-type articles are set aside (or at least toned down) and people are thinking about this institutionally. Andrew Gellman had a nice quick post the other day; Jon Bernstein has been making a series of smart points on the topic. Here’s what I’d add to the discussion, which I promise is devoid of Veepstakes conjecture.

People tend to forget that both sides get to pick a vice-presidential candidate, and therefore the potential advantage gained is not an absolute, but instead a net, number. If I can get Henry Clay below me on my ticket, that’s pretty awesome. But not if you have Ulysses S. Grant on yours. And so while you obviously want to maximize the marginal positive effect of your candidate, you have to accept that the actual overall effect is going to be highly dependent on a choice over which you have no control. So most of the time you are best off just picking someone ultra safe and vetted, and hoping that your opponent makes a major mistake. But don’t get your hopes up. Yes, your opponent can screw up (i.e. Palin 2008), but it takes a pretty darn egregious vetting error. There are just far too many people who pass the “bad choice, poor candidate, but not enough voters care to make the net advantage a marginal difference in the election” test. It’s just really tough to make the direct electoral value-added argument when you are talking about a few percentage points — at most — in one or two states. And again, that’s as a net effect balanced against the few percentage points in some other state that your opponent is grabbing.

In fact, I don’t think it’s crazy to suggest that VP selection has never altered the binary outcome of the presidential election in the United States. This isn’t to say that picks haven’t been made with the thought that they might cover the difference. (The GOP in 1864 comes instantly to mind, when they replaced a moderate but absolutely orthodox anti-slavery Republican from Maine, Hannibal Hamlin, with a War Democrat from Tennessee, Andrew Johnson.) The point is that the marginal net effect of [the winning VP candidate minus the losing VP candidate] has probably never put a ticket over the top. Or at least there’s no proof it has. As it turned out, Lincoln didn’t need a War Democrat on the ticket to get over the top in ’64. And everyone likes to say that LBJ delivered the South in 1960, but it’s not an obvious case: Kennedy did worse in the South than Stevenson had done in ’56, so the logic only holds if you can demonstrate that either LBJ radically minimized the segregationist/anti-catholic flight to Byrd or that Nixon was poised to win electoral votes the deep south ex ante in ’60. I’m more than happy to listen, but I’m skeptical on both counts.

Of course, there are other, indirect considerations that might make the choice important. VP candidates could be awesome fundraisers. Or come with great organizational setups and connections. Or be incredible persuasive when assembling interest coalitions. But there’s no reason to think anyone has all that much of a comparative advantage on any of these dimensions, regardless of the absolute magnitude of the effect such advantages might convey on their own (which, I think, is quite small anyway). And, yes, there are clear secondary electoral reasons, too: VP candidates can satisfy wings of a party that are disgruntled with the presidential nominee, or they can play to ethnicity or race or gender or other ascriptive vote-getting techniques. And, of course, they can fill in policy or background voids of the candidate at the top of the ticket. But again, there’s no reason to believe these things add much, if anything, to the electoral strength of the ticket.

Still, there’s one situation in which a VP candidate can have a huge effect: if the President ends up dead. I don’t mean that as a joke. We’re in the 56th presidential term in the history of our nation. Eight out of the previous 55 have resulted in dead president (WHH, Taylor, Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, Harding, FDR, Kennedy). That’s just under 15%. Over 16% if you add in Nixon’s resignation as a 9th instance (which, I think, is probably slightly different since the President’s decision to resign might be somewhat endogenous to the VP heir, but nonetheless completely defensible to include). The resulting Presidencies of those VP’s, I think, were mostly unlikely to occur on their own. There’s just no imaginable way that Andrew Johnson was going to end up President on his own accord, and I think that’s probably also true of Tyler, Arthur, Coolidge, and Truman. TR, LBJ, and Fillmore were certainly players in the game, but even they were far from likely future Presidents. And short of circumstance, Jerry Ford would have died a respected but mostly-forgotten Congressman from Michigan.

And, like all Presidents, those 9 men left their mark on the office and on the country. And to varying degrees, those marks were different than the marks that would have been left by a completed regular term of the dead president and the subsequent next few regular elections. In some cases vastly so. And thus to say that the selection of the VP is irrelevant, while certainly true in the instant electoral sense, is just plainly not true in the broader sense. Again, ask the Civil War Republicans. How many of them wish they had just sucked it up, taken the risk, and renominated the moderate, but strongly anti-slavery and definitely Republican, Hannibal Hamlin? I’ll tell you the answer: every last one of them. I’m pretty sure the Radicals would have taken Bill Buckley’s random draw from the Boston phone book over Johnson.

And this points us to a blind spot that political parties, I think, have in these circumstances: they overvalue the relative importance of the short-term electoral benefits from VP selection in contrast to the potential impact of the vice-president on the fortune of the party in the case of a dead president. There’s certainly merit in doing every last thing you can to maximize your chance of winning the next presidential election, but when taken to the extreme, you can end up in the Andrew Johnson situation. Granted, those were desperate times, an extreme example, and perhaps a justifiable move under circumstance. But the same rationale can be applied to any election. Unless you honestly believe that 2 percentage points in one state is going to make or break the election, you are probably better off  picking a nominee who fits squarely into your ideological vision and whom you can see yourself backing in the next election. (This holds for a party and its activists, at least; I’m less certain about this from the point of view of an individual presidential candidate, although I think it still holds.)

Now, most current VP candidates fulfill this need. The GOP tends to pick VP candidates from the mainstream of their party, and the Democrats do likewise. But I think the typical party (and chattering class) goals — pick a person who “balances” the ticket, or adds some geographic pull, or shakes up the narrative — are wrongly prioritized over the more basic idea of picking someone who would be a competent President and a compelling leader for the party and its ideological goals if they were at the top of the ticket. Because there’s a serious chance — much higher than most people assign at any rate — of them actually being the President at some point in the following eight years. It seems to me the biggest VP selection mistakes are made precisely when the decision deviates from the dimension of “best president if it came to that.”

And that’s also why I try to never make “warm bucket of piss”*** jokes about the vice-presidency. It’s less apt than it appears. Unless you are a serious first-flight contender not in your virgin go-around, being vice-president is probably a more likely route to the Presidency than entering the party primaries. Which sort of explains why everyone makes fun of the vice-presidency, but people rarely turn down nomination to it.

***I refuse to use the sanitized “warm bucket of spit” line, since I think the evidence is clear than Garner said, and meant, “piss.” And the original is way funnier. This is politics, not children’s television, folks.

Yesterday, I discussed the explosion of inbound email to Congress, and some of its possible impacts, particularly the way it alters a congressional office’s representational relationship with citizens and potentially has a nationalizing effect on politics, because of the difficulty of filtering out constituents from non-constituents. I don’t want to make too much of this, however, for a few reasons. First, it would be vastly overstating the case to say that email is nationalizing congressional politics. If it is having an effect — which we don’t really know, after all we’re just theorizing here based on some aggregate statistics and anecdotal evidence — the effect is a marginal one, and almost certainly pales in comparison to other nationalizing forces in congressional politics.

Second, I kind of (purposefully) set up of a strawman yesterday when I said there isn’t a sorting algorithm for constituent email. As most interns on the Hill know (and as several emailed to remind me yesterday!), there are techniques for filtering out non-constituent email. A little background: almost every congressional office uses a Correspondence Management System (CMS) to process constituent communications, the most popular being Intranet Quorum (IQ). The CMS has a database of all district constituents, and allows you to input all aspects of a constituent mailing — date, subject category, opinion, response, etc. — for the purpose of tracking both individual and district-wide communications data.

So one way to filter the emails — which almost all offices try to do now —  is to force constituents to fill out a web form when sending an email to the office that includes their address. That way, you can cross-check it with the CMS and determine whether the sender is a constituent. Of course, there are problems with this. First, it doesn’t work when people skip the web form and directly email staffers by finding out the email address of the LA on their topic of interest. Second, it requires the web form, which may dissuade actual constituents from writing. Third, it can be beaten relatively easily by anyone who really wants to flood Congress with opinion mail; whereas the old postal sorting system could only be beaten by postmarking stuff from each district, a strategic emailer needs only harvest an address from a district.

The end result is that a lot of the representational promise of email from the mid-90’s has not been borne out. At the outset of the email explosion, many people thought it might be a possible source of data for an office, one that could provide a good guide to district opinion. But at this point, it has largely become something that needs to be managed. The low cost of sending an email has resulted not in more useful communication from constituents, but just more work for interns and staff assistants to make sure that every constituent gets a timely response to their inquiry. And so the largest effect of the inbound email explosion has been on the structuring of the congressional offices: more low-level staffers than ever are assigned to correspondence work, but paradoxically the correspondence itself is of less value to the office.

Now, some will say this was always true of the postal mail. That its value to the office was entirely negative, it only created work in making sure that constituents got timely responses, and that the ideal point for any office was to receive zero constituent mail. Undoubtedly, in many cases that was (and is) true. If you are a solid pro-choice Representative, the only thing that pro-life mail does is generate staff work and resource costs in logging the CMS, printing out the form response for “pro-life constituent position inquiry,” and paying the postage to mail the response.

But I can also clearly remember instances of the mail being used to measure the balance of intense district opinion over hot issues. I worked for a conservative Democrat in 1998, who was very torn on impeachment. We tracked every district letter we received for three weeks leading up to the vote, and the fact that they were 70/30 against impeachment made a strong impression on the staff and my boss.And that’s something that I don’t think is possible with the email. Or at least not as possible as it used to be. And so ffices are left in an odd situation: many of them like to “see what the mail says” when they are thinking about hot legislative decisions, but the mail (and the phone calls in the age of cell phones and free long distance) is less representative of the constituency than it used to be.

But leave all this aside, because what I want to talk about today is the other side of the email explosion — the email and other electronic communications sent out of the congressional offices. I don’t think there’s any question that this side of the equation is not only fundamentally changing how congressional offices think about their constituent communication strategies, but also having a marginal effect on the nationalization of congressional politics, by offering Members the capacity to reach a national constituency that did not previously exist. And in the right circumstances, many Members might find strong incentives  to seek such national constituency. Now, we don’t want to go to far with this thinking; Members still get elected in districts by local constituents, and that’s always going to create an overwhelming incentive to focus on the geographic district first.

So with that caveat in mind, here are five points:

1. Electronic communications are different than old-school mail in three important ways. First, they have very low marginal costs. Sending franked mail to the district not only incurs a fixed marginal cost per letter, but also comes directly out of the Representative’s MRA in the House; any time you send a sizeable mass mailing to your district, it eats into the budget that could be used for staff or other resources. Electronic communications — be it email, social media, tele-townhalls, web advertisements, etc. — tend to have fixed capital or startup costs, but are then largely free on the margin.

Second, congressional offices are not limited as to who they can contact with electronic communications. Following a federal court action (Coalition to End the Permanent Government v. Marvin T. Runyon, et al., 979 F.2d 219 (D.C.Cir. 1992)), the Rules of the House were amended to restrict Members from sending franked mail outside of their districts. So it’s not even possible to reach a wider-than-district audience with postal mail. Electronic communications, however, are not so limited. Members can build email subscriber lists — many offer such subscriptions immediately upon entering their website — and the use of social media tools like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube allow Members to broadcast and interact with a potential constituency far wider than their geographic district, if they want.

Finally, electronic communications are fast. This is obvious, but it has important ramifications for how congressional offices choose to use it and how it shapes their communications strategy. Once upon a time, if you wanted to send out a tick-tock on the movement of a policy of interest through the floor, the only outlet was more or less to fax a press release to any newspaper that might listen, which invariably meant the local newspapers in your district. There was no point in trying to send postal mail directly to constituents at that speed. Now, however, you can tick-tock floor activity or other business to subscribed email lists or social media instantly, and if you want to send unsolicited mass communications to non-subscribed citizens, the lack of printing time and postal costs let you move them quickly through the franking commission and out the door.

2. The use of franked mail is at record-lows; the use of electronic communications has skyrocketed. The above is all great in theory, but what’s actually happening on the ground? Well, for one, the total cost franked mail coming out of Congress (adjusted for inflation) is at its lowest point since Congress began reimbursing the Post Office for congressional mail costs in fiscal year 1954. In nominal dollars, franked mail costs are down to $12.8 million in FY2011, from a high of over $113 million in FY1988.

Now, the steep decline in mail costs between the late 80’s and the mid 90’s was due mostly to two reforms: public disclosure of mail costs for individual Members, and direct charging of Members’ budgets for the cost of mail they send, instead of allowing unlimited mailings from a common funding source. But there’s a more telling decrease in mail costs in the last eight years, which is somehwhat masked in the chart. Here are the odd-year mail costs from FY2003 to FY 2011:

FY2003: $19.3 million

FY2005: $17.5 million

FY2007: $17.5 million

FY2009: $16.8 million

FY2011: $12.8 million

That’s a 33% drop in just five cycles. And comes during a period when the price of a stamp (which is a rough measure of postal cost inflation) went from 37 cents to 44 cents, more than a 20% increase.

(As an aside, the pattern persists of more mail being spent in even-numbered fiscal years than in odd-numbered years. While many observers have attributed this to the increase in mail sent prior to the elections, the truth is actually more complicated than that. The single month with the most mail sent during any Congress is almost always the December of the first year, as many Members send out end-of-session newsletters. By quirk of the fiscal calendar, which start in October, that means that the two peak months of franked mailing — December of the odd-year and the more modest increase in the two months before the pre-election cutoff in the even-number year (June and July) — happen to fall in the same fiscal year, distorting the stats. If you go by calendar year, there is almost no difference between election-year and non-election year mail totals, as the two peaks cancel each other out. I will do a full blog post on this someday.)

Well, how about the other side of the coin – what has happened to electronic communications coming out of Congress? We don’t have quite as fine-grained data as we do on the postal side, but we have a good proxy: the volume of “mass communications” (defined by the House as “unsolicited communication of substantially identical content to 500 or more persons in a session of Congress” which includes things like mass unsolicited emails, web or print advertisements, radio spots, newspaper inserts, etc. the House has been tracking this data since FY2009. Basically anything you send unsolicited to a whole bunch of people. The chart below shows the volume of quarterly mass postal mailings in the House from 1997 to 2008, and then the quarterly volume of all mass communications (which include postal mailing) from 2009 to 2011.

This graph should be striking. Mass postal mail volumes follow a familiar pattern of peaking in the last quarter of the first year of each Congress (from the December newsletters) and then again in the period preceding the election, and then drop off in the prohibited period (late 3rd quarter and early 4th quarter of election years) and the lame duck 4th quarter of a Congress as well as the 1st quarter of a new Congress. In the first Congress in which mass communications were tracked — the 111th, 2009-2010, a similar pattern was observed, albeit at a naturally greater scale (since mass communications are inclusive of mass mailings). But then in 2011, in the first session of the 112th Congress, the mass communications simply explode, to something like approaching 10 times the volume of mas communications sent in the first quarter of 2009.

My instincts tell me this isn’t due to radically-increased use of mass faxes or mass newspaper inserts. This is almost certainly electronic communications of the internet age, taking off for real out of congressional offices. I have not examined the data carefully yet at the individual level, but I think there’s good theoretical reasons to believe that a lot of it can be attributed to two things: first, the influx of 90+ new House Members, most of whom have come to politics in the information age. Second, and related, is the effect of the 2010 election, in which social media and electronic communication played a large role in both campaign information dissemination and fundraising strategies. Freshmen Members are arriving in Congress already electronically plugged-in to large networks of constituents and non-constituents through email lists, Facebook accounts, Twitter feeds, and other media. In short, times are changing and young replacement Members are most savvy to it. That would be my guess, at least.

Anyway, with the outbound data trends out of the way, let’s get back to the more speculative talk about the impact this might be having representation:

3. The opportunities for surrogate representation have seemingly incrased. 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) of course 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.

4. There may be electoral pressure to nationalize representation. But it goes deeper than this. Electoral challengers may be 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 pseudo-activists to target the incumbent and its a no-brainer. And thus Members choosing not to undertake a new media strategy might at a serious disadvantage. And pretty much any new media strategy is inherently a nationalized strategy from a infrastructure perspective.

5. 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 district, 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 constituency that the Member has — 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 constituency 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.

6. But the constituents themselves may be nationalizing. Nationalizing their representational profile, of course, is also potentially dangerous from a Member perspective. 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 control.

Now, again, we don’t want to go overboard here. The electronic communications are at best having a marginal effect on nationalization of politics or transformation of Member offices, and the effect is almost certainly indirect if anything: by increasing the capacity of Members to nationalize, it offers a greater strategic menu of options to Members who might want to go that route. But working in concert with other nationalizing forces — the centralization of party power in Congress, the nationalization of fundraising, the breakdown of local and regional media structures, etc. — I think it may be playing a bigger role than is currently appreciated.

[This is part 1 of a two part post; for part 2 click here]

It’s no secret that the Internet has radically transformed the practice of legislative politics on Capitol Hill. Information is everywhere, and moves like lightning. And so I’m going to spend a few days writing some quick posts about one dimension of the change — changes to constituent communication — which is exemplary of the bigger picture of technological changes on the Hill.

Despite the somewhat obvious nature of the basic thesis — the information explosion has altered many aspects of legislative politics — people sometimes underestimate the magnitude of the change. After all, some of the trappings of the Hill give off the appearance of an institution and a culture that strongly defies technological change. Official politics still takes place face to face, both on the floor and in committee, in their office; Members still physically walk from their offices to the floor in order to debate and cast votes; and heck, the Senate still votes by calling the roll, no different than they did in the 18th century. The visible practice of politics, as seen on C-SPAN or gleaned from walking around the Hill,  is hardly different than it was in 1960. Or 1860, for that matter.

But below the surface, things have radically changed. Members no longer seek information so much as look for better ways to sort and filter it. Staffers are no longer chained to their desks and their hard-line telephones. And, perhaps most importantly, the relay of information from the Hill to the rest of the country (and vice-versa) has been reduced, time-wise, to basically zero. As soon as it happens here, it’s known everywhere. And not only is the information relay faster after something happens, but the outside, non-Hill world feels closer to the policy-making process before anything happens. And that has consequences.

And the most basic consequence is that which corresponds to the most basic feature of a legislature: the representation of a body of constituents by an elected individual, and the communicative relationship between the constituents, the representative, the election, and the political and policy decisions the representative makes. To which I present figure 1, which plots incoming mail to the House and Senate since 1996, as a function of delivery medium. The top line (black) is incoming emails, the bottom line (red) incoming postal mail.

If you don’t work in politics, this graph is probably pretty striking. If you do, it’s probably either familiar or terrifying, or both. Members of Congress interact with constituents in a variety of ways: in person, both in their districts and in Washington; over the phone when people call their offices; and through the mailing of letters. We can’t say for sure how many people a Member meets in person or how many phone calls come to the Hill each day. But I think it’s safe to say that, traditionally, neither of those forms of communication ate up nearly as much time as the mail did in a congressional office. The mail comes three times a day in Congress, and it’s unrelenting.

At least that’s my recollection from 1998, when I was a lowly intern in the House and spent much of my day opening it. And so it makes me shudder to think that, back then, the postal mail was still the majority of mail that came to Congress. Since then, of course, it has fallen (about 16% less postal mail incoming to the House since 1998, down from about 15 million pieces to about 12 million pieces). But it’s been replaced by three hundred million emails. In fact, postal mail is now just 7% of all mail coming to the Hill. And that 7% is actually 100% of the mail that was coming in 1994. Terrifying.

A few things worth discussing:

1. First, some technical details. Email was first available and used on the Hill in late 1994 or 1995. No hard data exists on total usage prior to 1996, and data for 1996 and 1997 are only estimates. Second, incoming postal mail does not include mail sent to district offices, just mail sent to the Capitol complex in Washington; email volumes include all mail sent to House or Senate email addresses, regardless of end-user location.

2. More technical stuff. The email numbers are post-spam filters (i.e. only mail that actually reached end-users). This makes them slightly difficult to compare year to year, since the spam filters (as well as the spam senders) have gotten dramatically better over the years. In fact, the large peak in 2007 and the drop-off following it are almost certainly do to the explosion of more intelligent spam and the corresponding adoption of powerful new and improved spam filters in both chambers that year. The lesson, as always, is that these numbers represent a trend, not precise reflections of reality, and should be treated with that in mind. Especially since the spam filter for postal mail — an intern throwing the junk mail in the garbage can — has not changed during the period.

3. With postal mail, it was always easy to know if you were being written to by a constituent or by someone from outside your district. The rule of thumb for sorting such mail is typically something like this: if it’s a constituent or interest group from our district, put it in the pile for things that we will promptly respond to; if it’s a constituent from outside our district, put it in another pile for things that we will promptly deliver to the correct office; if it’s a interest group from outside our district, look through it quickly and see if it’s personal or a form letter / mass spamming. If it’s the former, consider responding. If it’s the latter, definitely trash it.

The problem with email, though, is that you can’t tell if the sender is from the district or not. And there are quite obvious incentives to not exclude anyone who might be a constituent. And so the incoming email has a tendency to nationalize the constituent communications techniques used in most Member offices; there’s just isn’t a sorting algorithm that  lets you separate your constituents from other citizens.*** 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. More on this tomorrow.

4. From an institutional point of view, one key consequence of this explosion is the pressure it puts on congressional staff. Constituent and/or interest group service and communications is an important aspect of what goes on in Members’ personal office, but it is far from the only thing that goes on. To the degree that more staffers need to be allocated to the collection, processing, and responding tasks associated with incoming communications, the less staff time that there can be allocated to policy or other work, or the longer hours staffers need to put in. And while the number of staffers working in personal offices has increased modestly in the last generation (about 6% increase in Representatives’ offices since 1982), the prospects for a significant future increase — namely the proposition of a substantial increase in the Representatives’ MRAs or the Senators’ SOPOEA — seem quite dim.

*** This was (somewhat) sloppy writing, to make a point. I probably should have said “definitively lets you separate,” since there are certainly methods to filter out some non-constituents, the most popular being the IQ CMS software. I address the pros/cons of IQ in my followup post. The most important problem is that while IQ easily filters out people who weren’t trying to send you non-constituent mail, it is easily and routinely beaten by those who are strategically and purposefully sending mail disguised as constituent mail.