Article 1 section 2 paragraph 3 of the US Constitution (2014)
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I feel like the author pulls this conclusion out of thin air.
>9400 Representatives would make it a lot harder for lobbyist to sway the will of our elected officials.
because a ~20x increase in the number of representatives would probably mean a roughly proportional increase in lobbying resources
The representatives become more dependent on scheduling and organization, so lobbying shifts to those people who control the calendars and schedules.
You can't have a working organization of 9400 people who all have equal power. If it isn't given an explicit hierarchy, one will form spontaneously, and lobbyists will obviously focus on the topmost layers of it.
If there are 9400 targets, you don't lobby all 9400 of them. You lobby the 940 most likely to sway the vote.
I know when it comes to votes on our borough council, those council members think about their neighbors, the guy down the street, etc. Now they're only representing about 2k people each, but it's not hard to imagine that if you represent 30k people, only a fraction of whom are politically active, you're much more likely to think of individual voters than if you represent over 20x as many people.
It would be more interesting to hear your thoughts on why you seem to think it's wrong. Merely a "citation needed" isn't helping.
Compare vs the blue dog Democrats that held up healthcare reform. That kind of party infighting is unheard-of in Canada.
American political parties are much more like broad coalitions than their Commonwealth counterparts. If a candidate is vaguely left-ish, supports high taxes, extensive government services, and/or is sympathetic to minorities and foreigners, they will likely run as a Democrat, whereas the small government and/or traditional values and/or America fuck yeah! candidates are more likely to run as Republicans.
The media only covers the party's leaders. I mean, Toronto has dozens of elections for mp seats, which should the Star cover?
The party the receives the most elected MP's across Canada wins, and their leader becomes the Prime Minister. The party votes for their leader, so Canadiens have little say there.
Sadly, most people vote based on who they want as prime minister, and they put little thought who is running their riding.
This is entirely rational, though. The local MP has two primary functions - one is to vote on legislation, and the other is to support a particular set of MPs to form the executive government (personified by the Prime Minister, because the PM usually gets most of the say in who makes up the remainder of the executive).
Both of these are important, but the choice of executive normally has far more effect on the day-to-day running of the country (and the executive mostly gets to set the legislative agenda anyway), so it's no mystery why people tend to focus on the choice of executive when deciding which local MP to vote for.
The party whip rules with an iron fist - votes where it is safe for party members to vote their conscience or directly constituents are the exception, not the rule. And my opinion is that a big reason for this is that individual representatives are basically anonymous here in Canada. They're too small to get any media coverage. The only time an MP or MP candidate makes the news is if they have a Cabinet position or if they make an apocalyptic gaffe. Debates, policy, etc. are ignored below the leadership.
No, there wouldn't. The electoral forces that drive duopoly operate the same almost independently of district size, changing the number of single-member House districts with first-past-the-post elections won't reduce duopoly.
Changing the electoral method might (and doesn't require changing the number of districts.)
If the foundational debates were happening today, I would argue for a 4th branch of government: operational.
A modern system should avail itself of available technology. An 'open source' operational branch of the constitutinal state would be afforded the power of runtime oversight of the executive, and ideally be crowd sourced. The issue of 'state secrets' is somewhat legitimate, but imo a healthy system would strive to minimize such requirements, and worst case it can refer such matter to the much more compact legislative body.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_of_powers#Typical_b...
[p.s. For example, detach from the deliberative legislative body functions such as United States House Committee on Oversight & Government Reform.]
Then again, the US system of government is not exactly a model for the 21st century.
Decoupling the leadership of the oversight of the executive from the dominant party in the legislative would be benefitial. This is already possible in context of executive and judiciary. As it is now, these committees are subject to partisan games.
Further, the legislative permits lobbying whereas there is no room for lobbyist pressure on this body. None.
> the US system of government is not exactly a model for the 21st century.
I am drawing a blank imagining which existing system today would fit that bill.
Looking at larger democratic bodies, the US doesn't seem that underrepresented compared to the European Union (1.4 per million) and India (0.6 per million!)
Having nearly ten thousand MPs seems very complicated, although I think it could be a good application of modern technology. However, how could this every be implemented? Even the most ardent supporters wouldn't be able to deny that it would be quite an experiment, and can you really do experiments on a nation state with hundreds of millions of people? We could try in a smaller country first, but using actual countries as "guinea pigs" sounds totally ludicrous.
1: https://jakubmarian.com/number-of-seats-in-the-national-parl...
Either I'm reading this wrong (what do you mean by "parliament"?), or this can't possibly be correct.
This ratio is likely only going to get lower. The number of senators is equal to (2 x number of states)[0]. The number of representatives is set by law at 435, and has not changed since 1911[1].
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_One_of_the_United_Stat...
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apportionment_Act_of_1911
[1] http://www.census.gov/prod/2/gov/gc/gc92_1_2.pdf see page 19
An "issue tracker", if you will.
Though I suppose elections are kind of like this.
Not sure if this is what you meant by "possibilities," but I see a couple of major issues with this:
- The cost of buying off a politician (oh sorry I meant "lobbying") dramatically decreases. It's a lot cheaper to campaign to 30,000 people than it is to campaign for several million.
- The sheer number of representatives (~10600) presents a problem: it grants much much more significance to the senate, because deliberating on bill in the house would be impossible (and introduces effective filibuster since a 40% coalition could use 5 minute speaking slots to take up 2 weeks of time on the floor)
- Gerrymandering would become much, much worse as the size of districts decreased and number of representatives increased, just because the number of options you have to split up your state dramatically increase. Potentially minority districts would have 90% minority support while majority districts could be much more competitive (allowing for far more of them).
That's something of an understatement...Los Angeles (just the city proper, not the metro area) would have more members of the House of Representatives than there the total members of the California State Assembly and California State Senate combined. (133 vs. 120).
Rather, it would be easier; the larger a body is, the less the body actually works in a flat egalitarian manner, and the more the work of the body gets done through formal or informal power structures created within the body; this is already a substantial difference between the Senate and the House when the latter has a bit over 4 times the size of the former, at 94 times the size it would be even a bigger distinction.
Lobbyists are experts at understanding and leveraging both the formal and informal power structures in governing bodies to focus efforts at influence.
It would seem getting this through 27 states would a lower barrier than a lot of other options.
Add in term limits and repeal of the 17th amendment is a better formula then amending the constitution to overturn Citizen United.
As for the repeal of the 17th Amendment, I'm not favor of that, as this is the only hedge we currently have against gerrymandering that keeps our House in the hands of the two parties. There's a reason that there is commonly a party mismatch between the House and Senate. Once gerrymandering is removed from our system, then maybe the Senate itself is redundant in any form, and it can be removed completely.
I also agree with you regrading Citizens United, but it really shouldn't need an amendment since the idea of a corporation existing on its own is a modern day fabrication in the first place. However, since the courts went a bit sideways on this issue, it seems like an amendment will be necessary.
The Senate is only redundant because it is popularly-elected, just like the House.
What it ought to be is the voice of the states. The state legislatures and governors should select senators (I'd like to leave the exact mechanism up to each state, but the key is that the senators should represent the state; honestly, I'd like to make them responsible to the legislature & governor as well).
Our federal system was gravely damaged by the 17th Amendment; the states have become not much more than glorified local governments, rather than the sovereign states they ought to be (and, legally, still are).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Maximum_Speed_Law
There is no need for our state governments to have direct representation in our Federal government. All representatives should be voted upon by the people directly. The idea that the state governments themselves need representation at the Federal level was misguided from the start, in my opinion.
The EU does not act in this fashion because they have strong sovereign states who act in their own interest, and are much the worse for it. When an EU member state gets something like a refugee crisis all the other member states just tell them it's their problem and they need to deal with it. They view monetary policy in the light of which member states it will benefit and which it will harm. They can't even raise an effective Federal military force.
Frankly this type of government already failed as the Articles of Confederation and the Federal system was drafted as a response, but that still doesn't stop some people from clamoring for its return. The Federal system already contains numerous sops to the interests of states, and should not be weakened further.
The House of Representatives already does a pretty good job of representing geographic areas. That's somewhat contrarian since people think of the Senate as the one that's supposed to represent geographic areas (states), but in modern times the House represents the geographic areas (large sparsely-populated areas with conservative membership) and the Senate represents the actual popular vote (nationwide, moderately liberal by a small margin but highly concentrated in urban areas). This is amplified somewhat by gerrymandering, but the truth is that congressional districts are inherently geographic areas and that's the feature the representation conforms to.
If you wanted the House of Representatives to be restored to its original vision, you would need to do exactly what the topic suggests and massively increase the number of representatives to drive the error caused by districting down to a reasonable level. That would be very different from any other large-scale government and would be ruled by informal power structures inside the parties, at which point you might as well just go to a parliamentary system.
While we're on the topic, if I could change one simple feature of US politics it would be for Senators to serve 4 year terms, with every state electing one senator every 2 years. The current system of 6-year terms sucks because parties very predictably dominate presidential elections and off-year elections, and you end up with Senators who are thrown out based only on the fact that they now face an opposite electoral climate from the one they were elected in, that will inevitably reverse on the next 6-year term cycle. There is a huge amount of "churn" here that in my opinion serves no purpose.
Single member districts, first-past-the-post elections, and the Presidential system (which creates a big winner-take-all election, and makes the parties competitive for that election even stronger relative to other parties than they otherwise would be in downballot elections) are what keeps the House (and Senate, you will note, so the gerrymander-proof nature of the Senate is no defense against duopoly) in the hands of the two major parties.
Gerrymandering may effect which of those two parties is likely to hold which seats in the House, and effect competitiveness between the parties for particular seats, but is pretty much irrelevant to duopoly.
If we are looking at modernizing the system, could we stop tying ourselves to a time when communcation was by horseback?
Right now, it is nothing like that. My representative lives in another town, and I have never even seen her face in person except at a rally.
This should be unconstitutional.
Even with almost 10k representatives in Congress, representatives would still have 30k constituents each to deal with. It would be almost impossible to meet 30k people in a year, let alone give each of them time to discuss issues and fit in actually being a legislator.
At that time (ending in 1856), travel was also arduous and slow; nobody was going back home for the weekend.
Modern technology could make very large parliaments feasible, and make them more visible and accountable to the public.
This seems like common sense, but there are a number of things in the social sciences that don't work out as common sense would.
Voting is, after all, largely irrational.
The other possibility is that corruption would be reduced in scope as to make it difficult to detect and and root out. Do you know 10 of the 435 representatives? The average person doesn't. Have you seen a corrupt city council? Now imagine every 9400 of those people representing 30k and imagine the possibilities for corruption.
> The one problem with a number of Representatives being so large is that bill introduction may become a bit unmanageable. If we keep to the current system of making huge bills with tons and tons of legal code, things would be unmanageable. However, that doesn't necessarily need to be a roadblock. Maybe we shouldn't keep the current system of bill introduction! Maybe our Representatives should really just submit succinct laws that apply to very specific things. We would still need a huge bill from time to time to address social and other national issues, and the national budget, but we would pretty much end riders that plague the current system. We can even use 21st Century technology to make such bills easier to process. (Anyone hear of this Wonder called The Internet?)
Ok, so now the author is suggesting not just reforming law but reforming voting behavior. Good luck? What the author seems to be complaining about is an individual's access to their representative. This is fair, but reducing the number of constituents in no way guarantee that. The same dynamics discussed by Mayhew would still be in play. [1]
Access can be increased via modern technologies, but that's a seprate argument.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congress:_The_Electoral_Connec...
To me it seems like you have a lot higher chance of personally knowing someone who represents 30k people instead of the current figure. Finding a bad apple among a lot more apples sounds harder, but each 'apple' will have a closer relationship with the people they represent.
What fights corruption is overall social trust, which is a wash because changing the size of the legislature won't change it, official policies, and oversight by regulators, courts, and journalists. And increasing the number of representatives would be bad for that oversight--more people to keep track of.