Congressional Communication in the Digital Age

Communication defines political representation. At the core of the representational relationship lies the interaction between principal and agent; the quality of this relationship is predicated upon the accessibility of effective channels of communication between the constituent and representative. Over the past decade, congressional websites have become the primary way constituents communicate with their members and a prominent place for members to communicate with constituents. Yet, as we move toward the third decade of the 21^st century, little work has systematically analyzed this forum as a distinct representational space.

In this book, Jocelyn Evans and Jessica Hayden offer a fresh, timely, and mixed-methods approach for understanding how the emergence of virtual offices has impacted the representational relationship between constituents and members of Congress. Utilizing strong theoretical foundations, a broad historical perspective, elite interviews, and rich original datasets Evans and Hayden present evidence that virtual offices operate as a distinct representational space, and they demonstrate that their use has resulted in unprecedented and ill-understood changes in representational behavior.

Congressional Communication in the Digital Age contributes to the scholarship on representation theory and its application to the contemporary Congress.

Jocelyn Evans is the Associate Dean for the College of Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities at the University of West Florida. She is Full Professor of political science with a PhD from the University of Oklahoma, and her research interests include congressional politics, democratic theory, and political science education.

Jessica Hayden is a PhD student and Congressional Fellow at the Carl Albert Congressional Research and Studies Center at the University of Oklahoma.