This post on Best Of A Great Lot is a part of a series on the subject of designing a new form of governance. Each piece aims to stand alone, but fits together on the Table of Contents.
The ratio of voters to representatives has risen dramatically in the US since its founding. Naturally some people propose that we increase the size of the House. How much larger?
Here's The New York Times in 2018 proposing an additional 158 seats, based on the Cube Root Rule, originally from a 1972 paper titled The Size of National Assemblies. According to the paper, many countries happen to have a number of representatives that is close to the cube root of the population. Here’s FairVote with a similar argument.
Former Obama speechwriter David Litt offers the more extreme view that if the ratio had stayed the same since 1790, we would have 6500 representatives.
I have no idea why proponents of the Cube Rule think that an extra 158 representatives would do anything significant to improve upon the dilution of representation. With the Cube Root Rule, we’d still see over 400,000 voters per representative, which is the same order of magnitude as today.
On the other hand, with 6500 representatives, each citizen could have a better chance of knowing their representative. This would shift the dilution from the voters to the representatives, which is at least a different problem. Each rep would have significantly less influence. Managing thousands of representatives would become an enormous problem for Congressional leaders, and the current structures would require significant rethinking.
In a hidden way, some argue that we have a legislature of thousands of people already. Since the 19th century there's been an explosion in the number of Congressional staffers.
At the turn of the century and even by 1914, on the Senate side, there were fewer paid personal staff members than senators. Sixty years later, in 1974, each senator had, on the average, a staff of over twenty. Some senators employed more than fifty aides.
Today Congress has more than 15,000 staffers if you count Congressional, Senate, and support agencies like the GAO. Currently, we don’t elect these people, but they do similar work to what a representative was expected to do for most of the country’s history: they work on legislation, talk to constituents, etc. It certainly seems imaginable that we could elect some portion of these staffers as representatives and Congress could still work.
It’s fun to imagine that bringing thousands more representatives into Congress would allow a wider variety of backgrounds, and perhaps grant Congress much needed expertise. Most of those 15,000 staffers don’t come from a wide variety of backgrounds — the normal path is for young graduates of prestigious colleges who want to work in politics to snag an internship and then work their way up. If we want to inform Congress better with the skillsets and experiences of the country, we would need a lot more scientists and technologists, more teachers and plumbers, more healthcare workers, more blue collar and tradespeople — in general, a greater diversity of background and thought.
Unfortunately, simply increasing the numbers wouldn't change the dynamics that drive us to a relative narrowness of previous experience in our legislators. Each legislator is chosen alone, not as part of a set of skills that Congress needs, so the ratio of lawyers to everything else would likely stay high if we simply split districts up. This is a direct effect of bundled governance and simply electing more representatives won’t fix it.
If we had thousands of representatives, or if staffers were more independently involved in day-to-day activities, the legislature would have to push more of its work into committee. Either we’d need many, many more committees, or the committees would be the size of our current legislature. Organizations which scale from hundreds to thousands of people often need a lot more complex management structures, and usually suffer from some pretty serious challenges. The representatives who weren’t part of the leadership would likely have vastly less power and influence than they do today.
Having more legislators doesn’t seem obvious as a path to improving upon our governance system. Anyone advocating for it needs to work through the reasons why another hundred legislators will change the dynamics of our current legislature, or describe a system which can manage thousands of legislators in a reasonable manner.
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