http://thehill.com/homenews/216312-when-congress-was-popular By Elise Viebeck - 09/02/14 06:00 AM EDT
If you're not a paid staffer or blood relative, as the joke goes, you probably hate Congress.
The institution is so unpopular that voters were more positive about brussels sprouts, head lice and root canals in one recent survey. But there have been a handful of times over the last 100 years when the public gave a thumbs up to Capitol Hill.
In 1937, 44 percent of those surveyed agreed that Congress was "about as good a representative body as it is possible for a large nation to have." The number fell to 17 percent by 1990.
"The one thing we know for sure is that Americans usually don't like Congress," said Julian Zelizer, a professor of history at Princeton University.
What does it take for Congress to attract high approval ratings? To get answers to that complicated question, The Hill spoke with leading political scientists and analyzed survey data going back almost 80 years.
The following are five instances when Congress saw an upswing in approval and the experts' perspective on why those swings took place.
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