LIVING UP TO EXPECTATIONS - PUBLIC-ATTITUDES TOWARD CONGRESS

Americans' feelings about the performance of Congress range across the spectrum from positive to negative, but tend to be negative. What acc ounts for supportive or unsupportive orientations toward Congress; The effects of personal attributes like socioeconomic status, or beliefs about the efficacy of congressional processes, account for only part o f citizens' evaluations of Congress. We argue that discrepancies betwe en what people expect Congress to be like and what they perceive it ac tually is like independently affect evaluations of Congress. We measur e this ''expectation-perception discrepancy'' and demonstrate in a mul tivariate explanatory environment that this discrepancy affects the ex tent of Americans' favorableness toward Congress, drawing upon data ga thered in a 1994 post-election survey (N = 808) conducted in Ohio by t he Polimetrics Laboratory for Social and Political Research at Ohio St ate University.