The Congressional Management Foundation has just released a surprising survey about how many and how much American's communicate with Congress. Their results show that 44% of Americans contacted a U.S. Senator or Representative in the past five years, more than twice the percentage found in a 2004 study. Email was the most common form of contact (32%), followed by telephone (24%) and snail mail (18%). Only 7% said they used the contact form on the Senator's or Representative's website, slightly more than the 5% who visited in person. Perhaps not as surprising is that, of the 2/3's who remembered getting a response back, fewer than half were satisfied with it.

Of course, if Rick Shenkman is right, all this contact might be more a problem than a blessing. In his new book "Just How Stupid Are We?: Facing the Truth About the American Voter" he implies Americans aren't educated enough to interact with Congress and that "our confidence in democracy rests on a myth." (Okay, I confess, I didn't actually read the book -- not sure I'm bright enough. But I did listen to Rick on Diane Rehm's show and browsed a thoughtful review on Salon where I got the quote). Shenkman calls voter stupidity a "10 alarm fire" in American Democracy.

I'm assuming that high and growing levels of engagement with Congress is a good thing and that Shenkman represents the reactionary cohort who don't trust self-government. Of course, even Thomas Jefferson swung back and forth on this one writing both "A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine" and "I have no fear that the result of our experiment will be that men may be trusted to govern themselves without a master." (thanks Democracy Quotes).

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