The Makeup of a Truly Representative Congress

The role of the United States Congress is to represent the citizens of the United States—they are supposed to be “the voice of the people”. In order to do this, they should come from diverse racial, ethnic, and religious backgrounds, just like Americans. But how representative is Congress really? Does its makeup match the makeup of the American citizenry? In this post, I’ll try my best to answer that question.

It is not difficult to find lists of each member of the Senate and House of Representatives, but I wanted a set of data that included not only each member’s name, state, and political party, but also their gender, race, and religion. That required combining multiple data sources. I started with a list of the 535 members of congress (100 from the Senate and 435 from the House of Representatives) which included race and gender and merged that together with a list that included religion.

I then collected information about the population of the United States. I obtained race data from the Kaiser Family Foundation (

http://kff.org/other/state-indicator/distribution-by-raceethnicity/?dataView=1¤tTimeframe=0&sortModel=%7B%22colId%22:%22Location%22,%22sort%22:%22asc%22%7D

), gender data from the US Census Bureau (

https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/table/PST045215/00

) and religion data from the Pew Research Center (

http://www.pewforum.org/religious-landscape-study/