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by taoistextremist 3109 days ago
It's actually one topic I've grown to agree with my extremely conservative father on, that they should have never fixed the seats at 435. This was done long after the founding of the country (relative to the age of the country, that is), but if we had kept the original apportionment we'd have one of the largest legislatures in the world. It wouldn't solve the apportionment problem, but it would make the unfairness of any given solution much less consequential and also it would make gerrymandering harder (though still not impossible).
1 comments
specialist 3109 days ago
I think of it as a scale problem. A Representative's front office is basically a call center & triage operation. The embodiment of the Politics of Attention (squeaky wheel gets the grease).

What's the ideal size for a constituency? To maximize responsiveness, accountability, effectiveness? 100k? 200k? 400k?

I don't know, but I'd like to find out.

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itsameta4 3108 days ago
The Republic of Ireland's constitution guarantees a member of the Dáil (Lower Parliamentary house; similar to the US House of Representatives) for every 20-30,000 people, and districts are redrawn and reapportioned frequently.

This seems to be a pretty ideal number to me - it's about the size of the township I grew up in. Many people in their district would have personal ties to their representative, as a further detriment to attempts at lobbying/corruption.

The US constitution used to have a similar provision, but this was abandoned by the ammendment process in the late 1920's.

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squiggleblaz 3108 days ago
Apparently largest assembly sizes are normally fall somewhere around the cube root of the population. Obviously you don't want so many electorates that the house becomes unmanageable, nor so few the voters can't make an effective choice. See some political scientist's thoughts here: https://fruitsandvotes.wordpress.com/category/electoral-rule...

I have no idea if that's the ideal rule or how you might determine that.

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taoistextremist 3109 days ago
Around the founding of the country, there were arguments of some range between 30k to 40k. Obviously that wouldn't be practical nowadays, that would create 10k representatives and the ability of the government to respond to an urgent issue like war or economic depression would be severely diminished. It could also decrease public turnout because they feel like not just their vote, but their representative can't make a difference.

But yeah, I think at a few hundred thousand, though that would likely mean over one thousand representatives, could probably work.

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