At RealClearPolitics John Curiel argues that it’s time to increase the size of the House of Representatives:
There is nothing sacred about the number 435 in regards to representation. The Constitution and ensuing amendments never established a hard ceiling on the size of the House. Article 1, Section 2 sets a starting ratio of one representative for every 30,000 people within a state, with at least one representative per state. Applying this original ratio to the modern day, the size of the House would be 10,000 members, which is clearly too large. But the Constitution does allow Congress to change the ratio of members to state populations following each census via reapportionment acts.
How bad is the present situation?
Due to the freeze at 435 members, the average House district now represents over 760,000 people, which is set to increase to over 800,000 by 2030. Worse yet, House members effectively represent more constituents than every other major Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development country in the world. Pakistan ranks second to the U.S. at just under 600,000 people per district, and most other countries, such as the U.K., have well under 200,000 people. What distinguishes the U.S. relative to other OECD countries is that the size of its lower legislative chamber shares more similarities with competitive oligarchical/authoritarian nations such as Russia, China, Brazil and Pakistan, than actual representative democracies, such as Canada, the Netherlands, and Germany.
He argues for using something called the “cube root rule”:
Increasing the size of the House therefore appears like a straightforward way to reform some obvious obstacles to representation. The question then arises: How large should it be? A House of 10,000 members is certainly too large for any business to be accomplished. As Madison noted in Federalist 55, “Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.†It turns out, however, that there is a general mathematical rule, the cube-root rule, that most other industrialized democracies follow. Following the rule, 435 seats would be appropriate for a nation with a population of about 82 million. With the U.S. population around 330 million, we should now have around 691 seats. A House with that many members would result in an average district size of around 480,000 constituents, approximating the size of districts in the 1970s.
While I agree that with today’s technology it is possible for a representative to represent adequately many more people than in 1790, I’m skeptical that it is possible with his cube root of 450,000 constituents per representative. While I would support his reform I think it is necessary but not sufficient.
In my opinion the other reform that is necessary is to reduce the size and scope of the federal government, returning more power to the states. Bear in mind that neither of the reforms mentioned will ever be adopted by our present Congress because it reduces the power and wealth of its members. The only way for it to happen would be for it to be imposed on them.
But let’s ask a more basic question: what is democracy? What are the dividing lines among mobocracy, representative democracy, and oligarchy? I think for representative democracy to be anything a cruel charade representatives must be able to know and respond to their constituents which means that districts much be much, much smaller and much, much more cohesive than is the case at present.
Which of the following is true?
“In my opinion the other reform that is necessary is to reduce the size and scope of the federal government, returning more power to the states. Bear in mind that neither of the reforms mentioned will ever be adopted by our present Congress because it reduces the power and wealth of its members.”
“I think for representative democracy to be anything a cruel charade representatives must be able to know and respond to their constituents which means that districts much be much, much smaller and much, much more cohesive than is the case at present.”
Both.
I think returning more power to the states gives greater representation to citizen rights, their will and well being than continuing to leave it to the ever-growing, bloated, and self-serving powers of the federal government. Even changing the size of the House, IMO, will do little to increase the input of the “little†people, as the people can speak their mind all they want to, but government office seems to eventually turn off the receptivity of politicians, except when election time rolls around. And, then their words become lip service, rather than real service, to get them re-elected again.
As much as possible power to the states, especially over expenditures because that is where power resides, but also over taxation and commerce because that is the source of that power.
If for instance, New Mexico doesn’t want Amazon to do business there then they should have that authority at state level by Democratic vote.
FYI — the cube root law is an observation, but back in the 70’s a political scientist came up with a theoretical framework (based on optimization communication costs) that leads to a derivation that the cube root of the eligible-voting population is the optimal size for a legislature. Taagepera was also the first who noticed the observed the cube root correlation.
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/45g370k4
Amusingly enough; his background before political science was physics.
The point I was trying to make is that there are two distinct issues: the optimal size for a legislature and the optimal size for a district. The optimal size for a district does not necessarily yield the optimal size for a legislature and vice versa.
It might be that the U. S. has become too large to be an effective representative democracy.
If the claim is that you can optimize for the size of the legislature and the size of the district simultaneously, I am more than skeptical. I think that the House became less democratic as the number of people in a district rose over 200,000 is an observable phenomenon. It would be claiming that a district of 120,000 people (House of Commons) and a district of 450,000 (U. S. House at the proposed size) were both optimal.
Before 1776; the prevalent belief was that democratic republics were best suited for city states and did not scale to nation-sized/continent-sized polities; so there is something to the claim “has the US become too large for representative democracy?”.
My only thought is expanding the House beyond certain point is likely to render the House less effective and less representative. What happens as legislatures get larger is more power gets concentrated in a few members (Speaker, Whip, Committee chairs) to the point individual members have little input over the body’s deliberations. Just look at the power of an individual House member (1 of 435) vs an individual Senator (1 of 100). And no democratic polity that I know has tried going over 800 members or so.
The founders in article 5 did include the capability to amend the constitution without Congressional approval by the States legislatures.
More than anything else representative democracy requires consensus. As far as I can tell there is presently consensus on very little.
There used to be consensus on any number of things. Importantly, on the general benignity of the U. S. No more. I doubt that a consensus will be built around a spending bill that amounts to a third of GDP enacted by (at most) 50 senators and the VP.