What is Casework & Why Does it Matter for Government Offices?

A citizen has spent three months trying to get a response about her disability benefits. She has called the agency. She has submitted paperwork twice. She has waited on hold long enough to memorize the recorded messages. Nothing changes.

Then she calls her representative’s office. A caseworker picks up the phone.

Within a few days, the office has identified the problem, contacted the agency, and secured an update. The constituent’s issue is not always resolved immediately, but for the first time in months, someone is paying attention.

Stories like this unfold every day in legislative offices across the United States. They rarely make headlines. Yet, they may be among the most important acts of representation that elected officials perform.

Casework is the work that elected officials and their staff perform to help individual constituents resolve problems with government agencies; securing benefits, untangling delays, answering questions, or fixing denied applications. Political scientist Megan Rickman Blackwood calls this administrative representation: representation that happens not through legislation, but through the implementation of public policy. It is one of the most direct ways most Americans actually experience their government.

Americans often contact their representative to voice their opinion on policy, as encouraged by advocacy groups, peers, and elected officials themselves. For others, however, the call only occurs when something has gone wrong and they don’t know where else to turn. The issue may be a missing benefit, a delayed payment, or a denied application. But underneath each case is the same question:

Is my government showing up for me the way it said it would?

According to a new dissertation by Megan Rickman Blackwood, Ph.D. (UNC at Chapel Hill), these moments are not peripheral to democracy. They are democracy in action.

Why Casework is The Politics of Personal Connection

Blackwood’s research argues that casework represents one of the most important, and most overlooked, forms of political representation in American government. While political scientists traditionally focus on elections, legislation, and roll-call votes, most citizens experience government somewhere else entirely: within the actual implementation of public policy.

While this work is often dismissed as ‘bureaucratic busywork’, the stakes are higher than they may appear.

Today, 85% of Americans say elected officials “don’t care what people like me think.” Yet when asked about their own representative, roughly 40-44% report positive evaluations, including many voters represented by a member of the opposite party.

Put simply: a lot of American individuals perceive that their elected officials don’t care about what the individual thinks, yet the individual still thinks positively of their elected officials.

On the surface, this seems puzzling. It is so puzzling that it has been given a name: political science calls it The Personal Vote. The thinking goes that, as constituents engage directly with their elected official to solve personal challenges, they hold that official in higher regard for their service, regardless of the official’s other actions or opinions. Thus, this gap suggests Americans distinguish between government as an institution and the moments when government becomes personal.

Casework sits at the center of that distinction.

What is Administrative Representation?

Blackwood formalizes this form of forgotten form of service as Administrative Representation: the work elected officials and their staff perform when they intervene with agencies on behalf of constituents seeking benefits, assistance, information, or resolution of a complaint.

It is representation not through legislation, but through implementation.

Political science has largely treated these activities as secondary—a form of bureaucratic busywork. History suggests otherwise.

Senate Historian Daniel Holt, interviewed as part of the project, traces five distinct eras of congressional casework expansion. In 1907, private bills providing individualized relief to constituents (a precursor to modern casework) accounted for 89% of all legislation passed by Congress. During one session of Congress, 320 private pension bills passed in an impressive 90 minutes. As administrative agencies grew to absorb these responsibilities throughout the twentieth century, members did not stop helping constituents navigate government. They simply shifted from writing private bills to working directly with agencies.

As then-House Majority Leader Gerald Ford explained in 1965, congressional offices served as “the human link between a vast federal government and the individuals at home.”

That description remains remarkably accurate today.

How does Casework Happen?

Casework explains why Americans often feel disconnected from government while simultaneously valuing their own representative. When a staff member helps resolve a VA claim, untangles a Social Security issue, or secures an answer from a federal agency, constituents do not experience ideology. They experience responsiveness. They experience government working.

For government offices, this has important implications. If representation often occurs through casework, then intake systems, response times, knowledge management, and constituent outreach are not merely operational concerns. They are representational ones. The quality of the constituent experience becomes inseparable from the quality of democratic representation itself.

That shifts how we should think about:

• Intake quality: not whether a form exists, but whether a constituent without civic experience can easily use it.

• Response time: because a fixed check in three days and a fixed check in three weeks is a meaningful difference for most Americans.

• Institutional memory: because the staffer who handled last year’s VA case carries knowledge the next constituent needs.

• Proactive awareness: if democracy is measured by who is seen, then waiting for people to walk in the door has consequences.

Civic’s work on Revere is built around this premise. Government offices don’t just need a CRM. They need infrastructure that treats casework as the representational function it actually is -- where institutional search and a clean constituent record are not ‘nice-to-have’. Instead, they are the substance of the job.

Casework’s Potential

The fact that 85% of Americans doubt their government cares about what ‘people like them’ think isn’t a communication problem. It’s a structural one. When Americans say the government doesn’t listen, it often means they haven’t personally experienced the opportunity to feel heard.

Casework is the single most reliable way to change that.

The next post in this series examines a surprising problem hidden inside modern casework systems: access. If casework is where representation becomes real, who actually gets access to it—and who gets left behind?

This is the first in a four-part series drawing on Megan Rickman Blackwood’s 2026 dissertation, “Why Casework? Reimagining Political Representation Through Proactive Service” (UNC at Chapel Hill).