I’ve heard from various sources over the years that in taking a sense of their constituencies members of Congress consider each letter from a constituent to be representative of the opinion of some number of constituents. The number varies from source to source. The theory being that for everyone who’s motivated enough to write there are people who feel the same way but who don’t take the time to write. Is there any reliable research that backs this idea? Is there similar research regarding phone calls, telegrams, emails and the like? Or is this just one of those things everyone knows without any basis?
To me, it sounds more like a bit of lore which goes to show that writing a letter to your congressperson can make a difference, very much like the “every vote counts” slogans we hear before elections. It’s not as if I disapproved of writing your opinion to you representative, or even going to the polls. I just believe that this story doesn’t really have factual basis and is circulating to motivate people. I guess different congresspersons (respectively their offices, handling their mail) will consider this very differently. If a large number of letters are expressing the same opinion, it will surely be considered by the decisionmakers, but I doubt that there’s a fixed one letter = x voters relation.
Way back when the Grace Commission investigated government waste of resources, mostly money. George Will wrote a scathing column concerning the shortcomings of their methods and the lack of support for some of the conclusions in their findings.
I sent a copy of the column and a letter to Senator Alan Cranston who was a supporter of the Grace Commission. I received in return a form letter from some flunky thanking me for my support of Senator Cranston’s efforts to improve governmental efficiency.
In this thread several of us related our experiences with how congressional offices dealt with letters from contituents. While they do collect statitics about how many letters they received and on which topics, they also are fairly sophisticated in identifying the difference between an individual writing a letter on his own and sending one as part of an organized campaign. I’d suspect that when they receive 500 copies of the same letter with different signatures, they actually discount the numbers in comparison to individuals who write on their own.