Is representative democracy quantifiably scalable?

Factual Questions
1

I can understand tribal leaders in small villages being elected to (or otherwise earning) a leadership position for a tribe of, say, 20 people. Many townships have their own elected mayor and/or city council as well, possibly ruling over 5000 people. Scale this up and you get counties (half a million?), states (few million?), countries (few hundred million?), etc.

My question is: Does the effectiveness of this sort of government demonstrably/quantifiably scale with the number of constituents?

At the tribal level, you would have pretty much direct contact with all your constituents. At the national level, one elected representative (or a group of them) would have advisors and industry representatives and special interest groups, etc., because there’s no way one human being can talk to all the millions s/he might represent.

How do you calculate the upper limit for which this sort of layered representation exceeds the capabilities of a single human mind? Is that even an issue or can things but sufficiently abstracted as they scale up so that one person can understand everything that’s happening, just with decreasing levels of detail?

Sorry, I wish I could phrase this better. If anyone understands what I’m trying to ask and can put it in better words, please do :slight_smile:

2

This is an empirical question. You are not going to be able to derive a reliable answer from first principles, there are just too many variables, most of them poorly understood. Unfortunately, it is also impossible to do controlled experiments for reasons of ethics, time, and cost. All we can do is look at actually existing attempts to run via representational democracy on a large scale and see how well they work out over time. The most relevant examples would see to be India and the United States, the largest representative democracies.

I would say that on the current evidence (especially from the latter example) the answer to your question is “No,” but who can tell what would happen if the relevant parameters were tweaked a bit (e.g., constitutions rewritten in some way)?