[maxwell]

Are you referring to a particular era when public officials (in Europe?) were elected from the general public or just thinking of halcyon days?

In the U.S., the main issue is that the House has had 435 members since 1929. It's become so obscene that representation was better, on paper, for colonial Americans in the British Parliament than today.

[thmsths]

I keep hearing this, and I think a charitable explanation is that scaling government becomes really hard past a certain point.

I would argue that 435 Representatives is already too much. Humans can only keep track of around 100 people. With so many representatives there is barely enough time for each of them to speak and engage with each other. Increasing the number for "better representation" will just worsen the problem.

A more cynical take is that since they just vote along party lines anyway, the number does not matter too much.

[maxwell]

Are you saying the country has too many people, or that Americans don't deserve representation (population per seat) in line with, say, Japan, South Korea, Mexico, or Australia because it's "really hard" for some reason? Are you advocating for dividing the country into smaller legislative districts?

Remember when we used to do things because they were hard instead of falling back on lazy cynicism and convenience of status quo?

The U.S. seems stuck with the two party system primarily due to the mathematics of the Electoral College and lack of ranked choice voting. These require changes at the state level, not federal.

16 states and DC have now opted out of the Electoral College (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Intersta...). RCV is now in place for state-wide elections in Maine and Alaska, but recently banned (seemingly as a partisan protectionist measure) in Florida, Tennessee, South Dakota, Montana, and Idaho.

Gerrymandering and lack of a mixed electoral system also seem major factors for the political duopoly, with less clear solutions to me.

[Wytwwww]

Japan and South Korea are not federations. US already has multiple levels of representation increasing the number on the federal level wouldn't be that useful. The electoral system and gerrymandering seem like much, much bigger issue than the number of people per representative.

[maxwell]

Congress can't do anything about the electoral system or gerrymandering. The only beneficial structural change that Congress could make constitutionally is to repeal the Reapportionment Act of 1929.

I'm not well versed on political subdivisions in Japan or South Korea, but there appear to be prefecture/province level officials that don't sound too far out of line with states. Looks like if the U.S. had the national representation (population per seat) of Japan we would have over 1000 reps, South Korea almost 2000.

[Wytwwww]

> I'm not well versed on political subdivisions in Japan or South Korea, but there appear to be prefecture/province level officials that don't sound too far out of line with states.

There is a huge difference between unitary states and federations. American states have legislatures, constitutions, and nearly unlimited rights to raise taxes. Prefectures in Japan are much closer to counties in the U.S. US states are much close to independent countries than to administrative subdivisions in unitary countries.

> Looks like if the U.S. had the national representation (population per seat) of Japan we would have over 1000 reps, South Korea almost 2000.

On the other hand it's about on par with the EU parliament. What would the advantages of significantly increasing the number of representatives be? Most individual matters should be addressed to state officials anyway.

[maxwell]

> What would the advantages of significantly increasing the number of representatives be?

Better representation, obviously. This is like asking the advantage of increasing the number of pixels on a screen.

How many average constituents per member is right? We're not going back to <50k constituents per member like the U.S. in the 1790s or Nordic countries today, but unclear why we can't get under 300k per constituent like Mexico or Australia.

We're an extreme outlier in OECD countries:

https://www.amacad.org/ourcommonpurpose/enlarging-the-house/...

Looking at federations instead of unitary states, Mexico has ~250k per member, about 3x better than the U.S., while Australia has under 200k per member. Germany has only a little over 100k per member.

Potential effects of better U.S. representation here: https://thirty-thousand.org

> On the other hand it's about on par with the EU parliament.

The EU is a voluntary economic union (see Brexit), the U.S. is a federation of states which may not unilaterally secede (see Texas v. White).

[thmsths]

Thank you for your last point. That's my hunch too. I am more worried about unfair representation than "diluted representation".

[thmsths]

I am certainly not saying Americans don't deserve representation. I am saying that when you're governing 330M people it becomes almost impossible to have proper representation. What good is it to add more Reps? So people can have easier access to their Reps? Good, except if the Reps are now drowned in the noise of all the other Reps you haven't really increased representation. As you hinted the solution might be some new layer of abstraction, but that's not a silver bullet since people tend to focus on national politics above all. I am not denying progress is being made (and we should strive to keep it that way).

[maxwell]

Hands waving, no points made, got it.

[toyg]

But party lines are set by leaders who are themselves representatives. If they had to interface with fewer constituents, they'd engage with them in a different way, probably listening more; having higher and higher numbers of constituents to care for inevitably shifts representatives into "cattle-herding" territory, setting them further apart than they already are.

Also, the more constituents, the more difficult it is for third-party candidates to run and meaningfully affect the debate.

In the end, continent-sized superpower government is really hard. Even in the "good old days", you often ended up with people like Nixon.

[thmsths]

I appreciate your point about the cattle herding. But if we were to increase the numbers of Reps to stay in line with population growth we would need close to 1200 of them. Which in my opinion introduces more issues than it solves.

[maxwell]

What issues?

[Aerroon]

On the other hand, you could say that 435 is too few, because they represent a lot more voters these days than they used to. Can they represent them without being able to hear them out?

In 1900 Congress had 357 representatives for a population of 76 million.

Today Congress has 435 representatives for a population of 331 million.