The public has so strongly and for such a long time so disapproved of the job our Congress is doing that we have lost sight of how bizarre it is that we should have a democratically elected government that regularly fails to please us.

According to James Madison, one of the Constitution’s authors and its most insightful defender, the whole point of having frequent elections for the House of Representatives was to assure that the members retained “an immediate dependence on, and an intimate sympathy with, the people.”

Madison’s constitutional design didn’t naively trust that our representatives would be unusually altruistic. Instead, they counted on them to be ambitious for re-election and eager for higher office: Representatives who want to win elections will do what the voters want.

The more frequent the elections, the more closely attuned to the immediate interests of the people the representatives must be, and the more opportunities the people have to vote new people into office when they feel it is time for a change.

We still have biennial elections for Congress, just as Madison originally proposed, but now it seems that our elections produce Congresses that are further out of sympathy with us than ever before.

Why should that be?

Part of the answer is that the sheer size and complexity of our government make the old mechanisms of accountability less effective.

Every action by any official of the national government, every regulation decreed by every last administrative agency, every development in our foreign policy — all of it is ultimately the responsibility of Congress, which authorizes and funds everything the national government does.

Unhappy with the IRS? Angry at some EPA regulation? Unhappy about the progress of the war in Afghanistan? It’s all ultimately the fault of Congress, and a fair amount of our dissatisfaction with Congress no doubt reflects dissatisfaction with the larger operations of government.

Now think about how we select members of Congress and senators and think about what it is we actually reward and punish them for.

How many pieces of federal legislation can you think of, and name the members of Congress you would credit or blame for them? Probably not very many; the average voter won’t name any.

Those of us in the general public are more likely to link legislation to the president than to individual legislators: hence we think of the “Affordable Care Act” as “Obamacare” and blame the deficiencies of the No Child Left Behind Act on President Bush.

Despite the best efforts of the founders, the ambitious member of Congress probably will not be rewarded by her constituents for drafting a major piece of legislation, or for effectively managing a committee, or for asking a key question in an oversight hearing.

The evidence suggests that swing voters — the voters whose changes of mind “swing” elections from one party to the other — respond more to overall trends in the direction of the economy and their sense of the overall direction of the country than to the specific legislative achievements of their particular representatives.

Politicians still are divided about whether the Democrats lost control of the House in 2010 because they enacted Obama’s health care reform or because voters just blamed them for the bad economy. If we cannot be sure about the electoral consequences of the biggest piece of social legislation in a century, then there is clearly something wrong with our mechanisms of political accountability.

The basic problem is that the vote is a blunt instrument. It conveys only one bit of information — yes or no.

Voting in free elections does the vital job of preventing the grosser forms of tyranny, but elections as we currently structure them can’t reward excellence in the difficult craft of governing.

If we want members of Congress to govern intelligently and effectively, we need to find better ways of rewarding them for it.

In some foreign political systems, the political parties themselves have greater control over the nominating process and so can reward diligent and skilled legislators, but our parties are too weak to reward good legislators.

Perhaps something like the Mac-Arthur Foundation’s “genius grants” could provide national recognition to legislators for outstanding success in the work of lawmaking.

Whether we try “legislative achievement” prizes or something else, we can be sure that politicians will do what we reward them for, and until we reward them for actually governing well, we should expect to be dissatisfied with their performance.

Joseph R. Reisert is associate professor of American constitutional law and chairman of the department of government at Colby College in Waterville.