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Joshua J. Dyck, Christopher J. Grill. The Public Side of Representation: A Study of Citizens’ Views about Representatives and the Representative Process, Public Opinion Quarterly, Volume 72, Issue 2, Summer 2008, Pages 392–394, https://doi.org/10.1093/poq/nfn012
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Americans are inherently distrustful of government, particularly of those officials whose political lives are in an almost constant state of campaigning. Whether or not this is a crisis is a matter of debate. On one hand, distrusting public officials is as American as apple pie, its origins entrenched in the founding of the country. On the other hand, some recent research has begun to unravel the political implications of distrust in government suggesting, for instance, that distrusters are more likely to support third-party candidates and prefer more conservative policy outcomes, irrespective of their political ideology. This is especially important if trust in government is relatively dynamic, which indeed it turns out to be.
Against a political backdrop in which both Presidential and Congressional approval ratings are at historic lows, Christopher Grill has published a timely book, The Public Side of Representation. Grill attempts to better understand what he sees as an overlooked part of the story on studies of Congressional approval—how the public defines and ultimately understands representation, what citizens expect from individual public officials, and what they expect from Congress as an institution. Some of the questions will be familiar to the students of public opinion. Theoretically, these questions resonate with those of John Hibbing and Elizabeth Theiss-Morse. In the spirit of Richard Fenno, Grill's methodological innovation involves conducting a series of in-depth interviews, using open-ended questions, and creating a dialogue with citizens about representation where they are allowed to think out loud and to come face-to-face with their ambivalence; moreover, they are encouraged to define representation in their own words. Grill is aware of the tradeoff he is making, sacrificing generalizability for depth and perhaps forcing us to rethink our assumptions and definitions of representation.
