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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
Regardless some very important economic and other policy decisions are taken on the EU level so wouldn't the same arguments regarding representation apply?
It just seems that scaling legislatures beyond a certain point might have diminishing returns would increasing the house to 900+ members really be a significant improvement? The actual influence a single random representative might be able exert would also be significantly diminished. Let's be honest the federal house of representatives is very extremely dysfunctional and is hardly even capable of accomplishing anything useful would increasing it's size somehow improve that?
And again in a multilayer heavily decentralized system such as the US most decisions that directly affect you or that you as an individual could actually influence are taken on the local or state level anyway.
> This is like asking the advantage of increasing the number of pixels on a screen
I'm sorry but (just like most analogies people make in general) this make doesn't make much sense.
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.
In 1900 Congress had 357 representatives for a population of 76 million.
Today Congress has 435 representatives for a population of 331 million.