The US House of representatives has been set at 435 seats since 1913 except temporarily when HI and AK were added, and it was reset to 435 after the next census.
I can understand that having a legislature larger than that may have been difficult with limited technology, but it seems to me that with modern communications and travel, that that particular limitation is not as valid as it used to be.
I assert (for the purpose of this OP) that the nation would be better served with a higher number of representatives. I know there are a number of issues around this idea, but I would like to limit this debate to legislature size.
Is there a good reason to keep the US House at 435, for logistical issues that could be boiled down to “too many cooks in the kitchen”?
Are there significantly larger legislatures in other nations? How well do they work?
What are the practical limitation for the US House given it’s workload? (assume a building to fit would exist)
What new challenges are faced as a legislature passes given population numbers? I know, from running camping events that certain things scale well, but many things change qualitatively in the management issues between an event of 400 people vs 3,000 people. I would imagine there are similar issues for a large legislative body.
If you got much larger, then discipline problems would become more acute (we’ve already had sit-ins and a very few physical scuffles.) With a body of, say, 1,000, you’d have to sit them in theater-style seating and force them to be more passive, more of an “audience” and less of a real deliberative body. (I’m thinking of the old USSR and their big legislative meetings, which were very much “one way,” consisting of presentations to the congress, and not really meetings “of” the congress.)
Another structure would be to break them down into large working committees, and then have “representatives of the representatives” meet for “inner council” gatherings. At that point, we’d have re-invented the Parliamentary Cabinet.
With the 435 we have now, we have a certain amount of real “deadwood,” people who are marginal. There are many representatives who never introduce legislation and who don’t debate. Even major votes will have a number who don’t even bother to show up. If you increased the number significantly, you’d increase the number of useless freeloaders who are shirking their jobs. You’d have more who were just “party-liners” (no, not “panty-liners”) who only exist to vote the way their leadership tells them.
Ideally, we’d have better representatives, and not merely more of them.
You wouldn’t need to change that. The chambers are massively oversized for their current role. “Debates” are usually held in front of empty seats. On the off chance that a member cares about what a colleague is saying, they watch on C-SPAN from the comfort of their office.
Britain’s House of Commons has seating for only maybe 2/3 of the members, and is still virtually empty 95% of the time.
[QUOTE=DagNation;19589210I assert (for the purpose of this OP) that the nation would be better served with a higher number of representatives. I know there are a number of issues around this idea, but I would like to limit this debate to legislature size.[/QUOTE]
The senate would remain the same unless we added more states so the “most deliberative body in the world” would not really be affected.
The congressional districts would be much much harder to gerrymander with a lot more districts.
I don’t know if smaller constituencies mean you are more connected to your constituency or more beholden to your large donors.
There are maybe 3 venues that could hold the state of the union address and only one of them is owned by the government.
Combing through all the legislative proposals starts to get really really difficult and this makes bill managers of major bills much more powerful because they can stick your bill onto their bill. Fiefdoms might start to develop.
But this may reflect that much of a legislator’s real work is not done on the floor of the chamber. The UK House of Commons may have a smaller chamber than the US House of Representatives, but it has more members - 650, as opposed to 435.
If we then consider the national legislatures of developed democracies with lower houses which are larger than that of the US, we see this:
It’s obvious that the representation ratio is much more variable than the absolute size of the assembly. That suggests that much above 650, parliamentary assemblies start to become unfeasible. If there are too many members, individual members may find it difficult to get to known enough other members well enough to make for functional parties, efficient committees, etc. I suggest above that most of the work isn’t done on the floor of the chamber; it’s done in the lobbies, the committee rooms, the corridors, the offices, by members meeting one another, discussing issues, finding common ground, etc, etc. Party leaders need to have a sense of where the members of their party stand, how they feel; this is difficult if parties have large number of members, many of whom barely know one another. The executive branch of government, whether that’s a US-style president needing to work with the legislature or a Westminster-style Prime Minister needing to maintain the confidence of the legislature, will find it hard to to that if the legislature is to large, and too disconnected, for consensus views and attitudes to form.
The biggest legislature in the world in the National Peoples Congress of the PRC, with 2,987 members. It only meets in plenary session for two or three weeks a year, where it formally endorses decisions that have already been made. Most of its votes are unamimous, or nearly so.
That doesn’t mean it does no work, however. Its real influence is felt when policy is being formed and legislative proposals are being drafted and tested. But all this work is done in much smaller groups. It acts as a forum where competing policy proposals can be aired, considered, discussed, and views about them can emerge. This informs the final proposal which the executive department will (eventually) put before the full Congress for ratification.
I don’t understand why that would matter. Members don’t vote from their seat in either house. They race in, vote, and leave. There’s never a point in the process (except maybe for the election of the Speaker) where they’re all sitting in their seats and voting in an orderly manner.
Why is “discipline” needed? Are you talking about brawling in the chamber or voting party line? With only two parties, voting party line on everything can generate unreasonable grid lock. Cite: the most recent 4 congresses.
Large groups can vote easily with electronic systems, and debates can be done in writing. I know it is done in law, and once in a while it happens on this very board!
USSR and China are not very comparable. Western style democracies are good comparisons.
We already have committees that do most of the work, and usually only the big dramatic stuff is decided on the floor. We do not currently hand over the authority to pass bills to the committees or individuals, and I am not supporting that idea at all.
“dead wood” and freeloaders… I would like to see examples of this. At this point it sounds like a strawman that might turn out to be a no-real-Scotsman argument without examples.
As long as we stop electing Can-liners I think we will be OK!
Better representatives would be nice, and could enjoy their own thread.
Sorry, I meant to limit the practical discussion to the House of representatives of the US. I am not suggesting any changes to the Senate. I am interested in how larger bodies have dealt with being large.
Districts and constituencies and similar issues are not a part of this thread.
I addressed the appropriate place for holding the new larger congress in the OP. It is assumed to not be an issue in this thread.
Could you expand on your last point? How would this be different than the current system of committees being headed by senior members of the majority party?
That depends on the job you expect the representatives to do. AIUI, your representatives are the prime initiators of legislation, whereas ours respond to government proposals. Backbenchers and opposition parties can use the system for demonstrative debating of other ideas, getting new points of view across or just trying to make the government look bad, but they don’t have as much influence or power over what legislation gets through (broadly speaking, if it was in the governing party’s election manifesto, it has to go through in the end).
On the other hand, there are what appear to me to be greater expectations on our MPs in the supervision of how the government actually administers and applies existing policy and administration, not least through dealing with the individual issues that constituents bring to them. Much of this in the US would be, I suspect, what is dealt with by the individual states and their legislatures (indeed, a fair bit of MPs’ constituency casework covers issues with other public bodies, and local council services - but sometimes that can be grist to the MP’s campaigning mill, if the local council’s run by the other party).
This suggests to me that democracies have not tried to push past 650 or so. I can see why very few legislators would want to increase the number of members in their own house, but politician’s reluctance to dilute their own power does not prove that large assemblies are not good at delivering results to the voters.
For the sake of this discussion, the limits we are defining are about how the function of the chamber changes as population goes up.
You do mention that as the size increases the personal relationships stop being nearly ubiquitous - a legislator can’t be expected to know all other legislators once there are too many. There is a similar issue when increasing a camp-out from 400 people to 3,000.
It seems to me that between committee relationships and party/caucus relationships, someone should be able to hook you up with the right people to help get 'er done. Sure, the meta-relationships are another level of organization for a large body, and that requires a certain amount of resources. I don’t think there is generally much cost for that layer. There is a curve that defines the cost/bene of any feature, and for a certain job, it may not be worth adding that layer in order to make the membership larger.
WE WIN!!!
So we have identified one limitation: Personal relationships and the need for meta-relationship management. There are some defined and probably some undefined costs in this area. I think we can say that this need starts at around 400 people and needs to be there in working order for anything over 1,000 people. We can also probably say that there is going to be a growing inefficiency in communication and thus idea creation due to people of differing views not speaking face to face or developing trust, even with a good meta layer. I am comfortable putting that down as a first draft limit. Yay we got one!
I am not an expert, so take this as a general overview: In the US, the House members are all basically equal on the floor, with some people presiding over the proceedings. Elder members hold more powerful positions in Committees and have more influence, but in the end it comes down to one rep, one vote.
The executive (President) is in charge of most of the Bureaucracy that is at the federal level, and in most states, the bureaucracy is similarly run by the governor. The legislature makes laws, sometimes holding hearings to get “facts” or whatever. The upper house, the Senate, also confirms judges and senior positions in the executive branch. These positions are the heads of all the different bureaucracies. The legislature can also fire these people, but it is a big deal to do that.
The Constitution prevents a single person from holding 2 positions in our government, and that bit about MPs also doing work at the local level does not happen in the US (Reps and Senators may campaign with local leaders, but there are no official duties).
I agree that size is not the only issue, but I am looking at the specific issues with size in this thread.
Well, when you have too many people in one room, it’s just mechanically difficult: it’s hard to walk, or make yourself heard in conversation. It takes longer to call the session to order, and if even a few people are talking, it disrupts the official speaker. This is no more than an engineering problem: the more components you have in your machine, the more attention must be given to internal regulation.
I think a greater number of representatives would be a wonderful idea!
You realize, of course, that the over-whelming majority of these new reps will be Democrat, don’t you? Increasing the number of districts would only change things in the highly populated areas, which vote Dem. Wyoming wouldn’t get any new reps.
I do think that congress does not represent the population as well as it could because of the limited number of total seats in the House, and that misrepresentation has historically favored the rural and conservative sides.
Currently the average is around 700,000 people per seat. If the average were about 100K per seat, then Wyoming would have 6 or 7 reps. That would result in a house of around 3,500, and now you can see why I am asking about legislature size issues.
More seats in the house would also alter electoral college math, and that would make my vote for an elector for president closer mathematically to the value of a vote of a person in a small state.
There are actually 441 members of the House. The extra half dozen are from DC and 5 territories. They only get to vote in committee hearings and not in full sessions, but there are seats for them in the House chamber. There’s a total of 446 seats in the House chamber, so they couldn’t expand much without redesigning things. Which would be difficult because it’s pretty packed already. And my impression is that this is why the number of Representatives hasn’t been changed in so long.
I don’t think the issue will be addressed again unless/until Puerto Rico is admitted to the Union as a state. Alaska & Hawai’i only had single at-large representative each when they were admitted and that was right before a census to the House was temporarily increased in size. Puerto Rico on the other hand would be entitled to about 5-6 representatives if it became a state.