The Congress of the United States is the legislative branch of the federal government, established by Article I of the Constitution. Congress comprises the 435-member House of Representatives and the 100-member Senate. Each House member represents a portion of a state, and all House districts include approximately the same number of people (pursuant to a 1962 Supreme Court decision). Each senator represents an entire state, and each state has two senators. The entire House is up for re-election every two years; senators serve six-year terms and one-third of the Senate seats are up for election in each election cycle. As a result of these structural distinctions, the House and Senate have significantly different rules and cultures and, frequently different politics.

For most of the postwar period, Congress has been controlled by the Democratic Party. The Democrats controlled the House, without interruption, from 1955 through 1994, often by wide margins, and they controlled the Senate during those years as well, except from 1981 through 1986. In the 1994 elections, in a stunning reversal, Republicans gained control of both bodies, and they held onto that majority albeit by thinner and thinner margins, through 2000.

Ideological control of Congress followed a somewhat different pattern. Congress gradually became more liberal through the 1950s, but a conservative coalition of Southern Democrats (sometimes called Dixiecrats) and rural Republicans was often able to exercise a stranglehold over Congress into the early 1960s. Liberals gained control by the mid-1960s, swept in by Lyndon Johnson’s landslide victory in 1964 and replenished by the post-Watergate 1974 congressional elections. Conservatives gradually made a comeback through the 1980s before consolidating their power in the 1994 elections. In 1995 the keystone of the conservative majority was once again the South, now mostly represented by Republicans and exercising additional political muscle, thanks to the shift of population to the Sunbelt.

But, no matter who has been at the helm, the public attitude towards Congress throughout the postwar period has generally been one of scorn. From President Harry Truman running against the Republican “do-nothing” Congress in 1948 to member of Congress Newt Gingrich excoriating the Democratic Congress in 1994 to President Bill Clinton attacking the Gingrich-led Congress in 1996, Congress has been a reliable political whipping-boy an object of public derision and dismay.

While its popularity has varied from year to year, Congress’ approval ratings in polls since 1966 have been below 50 percent (after an unusual high point of more than 60 percent in 1965). Moreover, polling since 1960 has consistently found that the public has less confidence in Congress than in the other branches of the federal government, and often less confidence than in “big business” or the media. At a low point in 1991, fewer than 20 percent of those polled expressed a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in Congress.

Yet this contempt is not necessarily bred by familiarity. Polls have consistently found that while Americans disapprove of Congress as a whole, they like their individual representative. Asked how they would rate their individual Congress representative, more than 50 percent of Americans—in many of the postwar years, considerably more— expressed approval. That is one reason re-election rates for House and Senate incumbents have generally been higher than 80 percent—94 percent for House incumbents between 1982 and 1992.

In addition, much of the public is unfamiliar with the basic workings of Congress. For example, a 1996 Harvard study found that 39 percent of those questioned could not say which party was in control of the House of Representatives—this at a time of repeated and very widely reported partisan clashes in the House.

The low opinion of Congress has endured, perhaps paradoxically even though the institution has in many ways become more open, responsive and professional throughout the second half of the twentieth century To start with a fundamental, the demographics of congressional membership have become more varied. The number of African Americans in Congress increased from two in 1947 to thirty-nine in 1999, the number of women increased from eight to sixty-seven in the same period, and the religious make-up broadened as well. House members, in particular, increasingly came from different walks of life; the percentage of seats held by lawyers dropped from about 60 percent in 1953 to about 40 percent in 1994, and people were more likely to be elected to Congress without having had previous political experience. In addition, while agitation for “term limits” on members of Congress increased through much of the 1990s, Congress had fewer longtime members, mostly because of a surge of retirements.

Each House and Senate member was also increasingly likely during the postwar period to vote his or her own district or state’s interest rather than to be swayed by party leadership. (While party unity increased in the 1990s, this was generally due to the increased ideological consistency of party membership rather than to the increased power of party leadership.) This independence reflected, among other things, an increased use of polling, which gave members a sense that they knew better how their constituents stood on issues and changes in congressional rules, especially those initiated in the 1970s, which gave more junior members of Congress greater say over the drafting of legislation.

Throughout the postwar period, it also became easier for the public to follow congressional proceedings. Reforms in the 1970s made it easier for the public to get a complete view of committee proceedings. C-SPAN, a non-profit arm of the cabletelevision industry was given permission to offer “gavel-to-gavel” coverage of the House in 1979 and the Senate in 1986. Furthermore, by the mid-1990s, many congressional documents were available over the Internet.

Groups outside of Congress also began to provide more information. Beginning with the liberal Americans for Democratic Action in 1948, interest groups issued annual “report cards” evaluating key congressional votes. By the 1980s more than seventy groups, across the political spectrum, were attempting to hold congressional feet to the fire in that manner. Public interaction with Congress, through mail, phone calls, visits and eventually e-mail, also increased throughout the postwar period, although an increasing amount of the mail consisted of form letters drafted by liberal and conservative interest groups.

All these changes led Congress to increase its institutional resources and to regulate its behavior differently The size of congressional staffs exploded in the early 1970s and then stabilized. About 2,600 people worked for Congress in 1947; in 1991 the number was close to 19,000 (in both Washington, DC and local offices). Beginning in the 1970s, Congress began to do more to oversee the ethics of its members—although that hardly prevented recurrent scandals—and to crack down on the most egregious junkets and other perquisites. Lobbying was subjected to more restrictions, and, perhaps most significantly in 1974 campaign spending was made subject to enforceable restrictions and disclosure requirements for the first time.

None of this, however, stanched the growth of “interest-group” lobbying or the increasing flow of campaign funds into party coffers. With the federal government playing a growing role in American life and Americans’ penchant for forming organizations (noted first by de Tocqueville in the early nineteenth century), more and more groups—business and labor, religious and secular, liberal and conservative—moved their headquarters to Washington, DC or hired burgeoning lobbying firms to ply the halls of Congress.

By the late 1990s, members of Congress were more likely than ever to accuse their foes of being in the pocket of some “special-interest” group—business, labor, environmentalists, trial lawyers, etc. The public’s suspicion that Congress was controlled by “interests” that did not represent the “public interest,” along with the inherently chaotic and combative nature of the congressional process, seemed likely to perpetuate the low esteem with which Americans of all stripe regarded Congress.