In our current system, Congress’s crazy behavior is actually rational

There’s no shortage of vital issues facing our country at the moment: rising gas prices, the ongoing war in Iran, concerns on the unfettered expansion of artificial intelligence. This is to say nothing of longer-term issues like immigration, healthcare and housing affordability, that continue to go untouched.

Meanwhile, Congress, the institution constitutionally assigned to tackle these vexing national problems, is nowhere to be found. Both the House and Senate are closed, and their members are off campaigning for re-election.

Unsurprisingly, the disparagement of Congress is unrelenting. Only 16 percent of Americans approve of the job Congress is doing. Critics claim that members are either uninterested in doing their job or more focused on showboating and gaining social media impressions than legislating.

But we may be looking at the problem the wrong way. Yes, legislators have chosen to campaign rather than govern. Yes, many of them devote substantial portions of their time to dishing out insults on social media, playing gotcha in hearings and attending fundraisers with deep-pocketed interests.

Icky as all those things are, they are rational behaviors designed to improve their odds of being re-elected. As we found in a recent report issued by American Enterprise Institute and the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins, members are strategic actors reacting to the incentives before them.

Legislators want to persuade enough voters to pick them on the ballot. This is why they are back in their home states raising money to run campaign ads rather than debating and deciding what to do about our nation’s problems.

But why are legislators not trying to get re-elected by making good policy? The answer is that making good policy is challenging, and the definition of good policy itself is not clear cut. The sheer math of persuading a majority of the House of Representatives, the Senate and the president to approve a bill is difficult enough. It becomes all the more challenging when legislators feel that voters will punish them for bargaining with members of the other party.

It is far easier for our representatives and senators to campaign than govern. This is why they are back home claiming credit for the good things happening in America, such as the rising median household income , and shifting blame to the other party for the bad things such as high interest rates .

Voters are not going to make legislators do a better job by grumbling and complaining. Nor is throwing the bums out a long-term solution. For more than three decades, voters have replaced incumbent legislators with fresh faces and shifted control of the House and Senate from Democrats to Republicans and back again.

To transform an underperforming Congress into a highly productive legislature, we must change politicians’ electoral incentives.

First, substantial evidence indicates that the structure of our congressional elections exacerbates legislative underperformance. Primary elections are a big part of the dysfunction.

Only around 20 percent of voters participate in these preliminary elections, and these voters tend to be more ideologically extreme than the average American. Frequently they also are single-issue voters who will only vote for and donate to a candidate who full-throatedly supports their position on abortion, guns or transgender rights.

Unsurprisingly, then, primary elections encourage members of Congress to stake out positions that are further to the left and right and to avoid bargaining with members of the opposite political party. They also tend to discourage more moderate candidates from running for Congress and reward those who are skilled at raising money from deep-pocketed interest groups.

Second, Americans need to take a long look in the mirror and recognize that we are part of Congress’s incentive problem. Fewer than half of us vote in midterm congressional elections. An abundance of evidence indicates that we are polarized around hot button issues, and that political extremists amongst us have fooled us into thinking we are way more divided on politics than we actually are.

A recent poll found that 63 percent of Democrats agree or strongly agree that Republicans are not just bad for the country but downright evil, and 57 percent of Republicans agree with the same sentiment about Democrats.

Although more of us register as independents than either Democrats or Republicans, we vote like reliable partisans. We voters were once happy to vote for the best candidate — ticket splitting occurred in more than 100 congressional districts in each presidential election from 1972 through 1996. But in 2024, only 16 of 435 congressional districts supported a presidential candidate of one party and a House candidate from another party.

It does not have to be this way. We should reform or replace primaries with electoral systems that better incentivize legislators to work for us. We also should get off the couch and show up to vote and quit letting ourselves be fooled into voting for people who are more interested in trash-talking the other party than trying to solve important national problems.

The U.S. is a representative democracy. Ultimately, the Congress we get is the Congress we choose.

Scott Warren is a professor of practice at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University. Kevin R. Kosar is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. They are the authors of the report “ Congress Is Struggling to Govern. Are Electoral Incentives to Blame?”