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by Sai_ 1070 days ago
> represented their constituents

How would they know what the views of their constituents are?

They'd require either require exhaustive, expensive but representative polling on every topic or wait in call back mode - the constituents with the most to lose or gain will call back and help them form an opinions.

The first is impossible and actually goes against the notion of representative democracy and conscious indifference. The second is the current way of doing things.

Is there a better way? Maybe technology can be leveraged to scrape public FB, LinkedIn, and other social media posts on a subject to (hopefully) get a balanced view on a subject.
1 comments
EvanAnderson 1070 days ago
> How would they know what the views of their constituents are?

The number of representatives in the US House needs to be expanded. The proportion of citizens to representatives is way out of whack. Having more representatives with smaller districts would allow representatives to better know and support their district’s interests and views.

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Sai_ 1070 days ago
Is that realistic? Even organizing a team lunch for ten involves a lot of customer discovery and tradeoffs and here too, the loudest voices (analogous to committed voters or lobbyists) usually win.

Even if the final ratio of representatives to voters is 1:10, you have only moved the problem upstream to this giant body of 33 million representatives who now need to agree on a policy. Simply voting Yes/No could lead to 50%-10 of the population feeling disenfranchised.

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EvanAnderson 1070 days ago
I think an expansion is logistically realistic and in the interests of voters. It’s also not in the interests of the established “ruling class” so it’ll never happen.

I found the arguments made by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences to be compelling: https://www.amacad.org/ourcommonpurpose/enlarging-the-house/...

I tend to find the entire Our Common Purpose report[0] the Academy issued in 2020 to be pretty reasonable and in line with what I think the public interest is.

[0] https://www.amacad.org/ourcommonpurpose/report

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