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advantage over challengers. Although helping constituents to obtain veterans’ benefits,
Social Security checks, and civil service pensions, or to navigate some other facet of the
federal bureaucracy, is a legitimate and important function performed by representatives, it
is also a significant electoral advantage, as it allows members to stand apart from their
party, and from Congress as a whole, at election time.21 In contrast to Canada or the
United Kingdom, where party organizations play a stronger role in politics, a large and
growing proportion of U.S. representatives’ electoral support is attributed to their personal
qualities and local activities, making it less susceptible to changing partisan tides and
negative views of Congress.22 Not surprisingly, opinion polls consistently find that voters
rate their own representatives much higher than they rate Congress.23 To more effectively
reap the electoral benefits of casework, members maintain increasingly well-staffed offices
in their districts. Some may wonder whether there are more efficient, systematic fixes to
the bureaucratic problems these offices seek to address for constituents, but the current
system in which elected officials’ serve as brokers for federal benefits clearly is seen to be
worth continuing.
In addition, federal legislators have allocated to themselves resources that enable them to
maintain visibility in their districts throughout the year. From 1962 to 1997, for instance,
members gradually raised the number of annual trips they could take to their districts at
public expense elevenfold, from 3 to 33.24 Of course, it must be noted on behalf of these
perquisites that frequent visits also increase legislators’ ability to understand their
constituents’ concerns and advocate better for them in Washington.
Included among each representative’s personal communications expenditure is the franking
privilege, which allows members of Congress to use the U.S. Postal Service for all “official
business,” at no charge to them personally or to their campaign organizations. Although
the privilege has been around in one form or another since 1789, in 1968 the standards
for what constitutes official business were relaxed considerably, and representatives began
blanketing their districts with literature that was likely to assist them in their reelection
efforts. Yet members’ use of the mail is on the wane in today’s Congress, as the use of
more advanced technologies increases sharply. Incumbents, for example, now cultivate
huge taxpayer-funded databases with detailed information about their constituents’
interests and interactions with the federal bureaucracy, which they can use to send out
issue-specific e-mails to well-targeted groups of voters within their districts.25
Term limits. Concern about the permanent hold that some politicians, especially legislators,
seem to have on their jobs has given rise to a civic movement in favor of legal limits on
the number of terms they may serve. Some jurisdictions have always required the regular
rotation of officeholders, and 36 of the 50 states have limits on the ability of governors to
be reelected, usually restricting them to one or two terms. At the presidential level, a two-
term tradition launched by George Washington, who declined to stand for a third term, was
broken only by Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was elected four times. The presidential two-
term limit became mandatory under a 1951 constitutional amendment. In the 1980s and
early 1990s, a private organization called U.S. Term Limits Inc. persuaded a large number
of candidates for state and federal office to pledge that they would only serve three terms
in a lower house or two terms in a senate, and the Republican Party’s “Contract with
America,” the platform for their successful takeover of Congress in the 1994 elections,
included term-limit provisions. In 23 states, measures were enacted to limit federal
legislators’ terms in office, though in 1995 the Supreme Court ruled that states could not
impose limits on the terms of federal lawmakers.26 That same year, the Republican

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