[timlarshanson]

Re the Apportionment Act of 1929 -- care to elaborate? Are there figures for "the worst representation in the free world"?

My impression is that there are many reasons for the dysfunction of congress; the media feedback control system (in a literal and metaphorical sense) plays an important role, as does the filibuster, lobbyists, and other corruption.

(Aside: in aging, an organisms feedback and homeostatic systems tend to degrade / become simpler with time, which leads to decreased function / cancer etc. While some degree of refactoring & dead-code cruft-removal is necessary - and hopefully is happening now, as I think most Americans desire - the explicit decline in operational structure is bad. (Not that you'd want a systems biologist to run the country.))

[monocasa]

Not the parent, but broadly agree that a change to apportionment would heavily change the US for the better. I don't think it would be a single fix for the country, but I think it would greatly help quite a few of the issues.

Originally there were about 35k constituents/rep. Today it's an average of ~750k constituents/rep, with some districts at over a million.

This is because of the Apportionment Act of 1929 capped the number of reps. If we had the same constituent/rep ratio, we'd have ~10k reps total.

If instead we went back to the constituent/rep ratio that existed originally, a lot of our structural problems go away, via a mechanism that's accessible via US code rather than a change to the constitution.

For instance, the electoral college is based on federal representation. If you expand the house by ~50x, that dominates the electoral college by nearly two orders of magnitude, and creates a very close to popular election.

It's also much much harder to gerrymander on that scale.

That scale would also have a return to a more personal form of politics, where people actually have a real chance to meet with their reps (and the candidates) face to face.

It also feels that by having a much larger, more diffuse legislative body, we'd better approximate truly democratic processes in a representative democratic model.

[kelnos]

> If you expand the house by ~50x

Wow, that's a lot! I recall reading a piece, I believe in the Washington Post, sometime within the past few years, on this topic. They didn't run the numbers for such a dramatic increase, but I think talked about a House size of around 1000 representatives. And I was surprised to find out that this didn't shift the balance of power as much as I expected it would.

But regardless, as much as I would like for it to be easier for Democrats to win elections (in what would be an entirely fair way for them to do so!), that just puts one party in power more frequently. It doesn't fix the underlying dysfunction.

[thephyber]

Biology is a bad example when applied to a government.

Almost all change in biology happens to populations, not individuals. In order for that to apply to governments, we would need to have massive churn and rapid experimentation of government policies and structures. These are not conducive to voter feedback (eg. Democracy) and would be so disruptive to business and life as to make governments useless until they reached some steady state.

I remember hearing that Italy had 52 governments in 50 years. It’s suffering from all of the same problems as the rest of western countries, perhaps somewhat worse than average.