From their vantage point on Capitol Hill, legislators and their staff are attentive to their responsibility to represent the interests of the constituents back in their district. One Member of Congress highlighted the importance of constituency considerations in Washington, D.C., when he noted, “You always have to think, what's in the best interest of my district? … Do you have a sense of where your district is?” However, who in the district is part of a legislative enterprise's “sense of the district” is a question that warrants further investigation.

This chapter takes three essential steps toward answering this question and assessing legislative perceptions of constituents in the district. The first of these is to describe the policy context in which legislators' “sense of the district” is formed. Legislators and their staff members do not represent their constituency in the abstract, but rather they represent their constituency on the issues that come before the U.S. House of Representatives. The focus here is on health care policy and natural resources policy, with attention to four legislative proposals that serve as the basis for the analyses of legislative perceptions of constituents that follow. A discussion of these bills conveys the policy environment in which legislators represent their constituents, and also highlights the dimensions on which these bills differ, thereby increasing the generalizability of the findings.

The selection of these issues also facilitates the second step, which is the identification of the policy-relevant subconstituencies that legislative enterprises realistically can be expected to see when they look at their district.