The average number of constituents per congressional district has exploded: from around 35,000 constituents per district in the 1790s to 210,000 in the 1910s to 762,000 in 2020. Within the next few decades, the average congressional district may boast nearly one million Americans.
This trend poses a series of challenges to American government.
Congress people are meant to represent all of their constituents. It is much more difficult for representatives to connect with a significant percentage of their constituents when they represent so many people, and it is much more difficult for constituents to feel that their voice—and their vote—matters when they are just one of 762,000.
While the United States is by far the most populous, it barely has more representatives than Canada, even though the United States has more than nine times as many residents.
Large districts favor incumbents as well as wealthy and well-funded candidates.
Large districts also make it harder for a wide variety of challengers— including racial minorities and third-party candidates—to be elected.
The size of congressional districts, then, has helped result in a Congress that falls far short of representing the country’s ideological and demographic diversity.
George Mason was a Founder whose words now seems prophetic: speaking about the proposed national legislature, he said it offers the “shadow of representation only.” The Founders would recoil at how the size of House districts has grown so enormously today.
How did it get this way?
The Constitution stipulated that each representative should represent a minimum of 30,000 constituents, with each state also guaranteed at least one representative. At the Constitutional Convention, it was originally written as 40,000, until George Washington got it dropped at the last minute to 30,000. Unfortunately, however, it does not say that a state is entitled to a new representative for every 30,000 people, but rather that that is the minimum, with no maximum.
When the first U.S. Congress was called into session on March 4, 1789, it had fifty-nine members. Congress was directed to conduct reapportionment within three years and every ten years thereafter. These measures were explicitly designed to ensure the House grew as the nation’s population increased.
During the Progressive Era, however, political elites did not want immigrants electing their own representatives, and in 1929, Congress passed the Permanent Apportionment Act, which locked the size of the chamber at 435. This number was entirely arbitrary, and arrived at because of political expediency, due to leaders in Congress not wanting members from districts of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe to be elected.
We should go back to George Washington’s idea of 30,000 people per district.
This would give us 11,066 representatives in the House of Representatives.
This would be the shot in the arm our Republic needs.
As districts become larger, they tend to become more heterogeneous. On the one hand, this flattens out the diversity of representation, making it harder for more extreme candidates to win. On the other hand, it also makes it harder for more idiosyncratic candidates and diverse candidates to win, as they may have a naturally more limited base of support.
As districts become smaller and the threshold for victory becomes lower, it is possible for more groups to elect their candidates of choice. The smaller the district, the easier it is for a minority group to become a pivotal voting bloc. This is especially significant in the case of lower-income voters.
Constituents could really know their representative. Lobbyists and special interests could not control elections that would be won by 400 or 600 people. Elections would not cost millions of dollars, so “call time” for our elective representatives (when they must raise money as essentially call center telemarketers) would be a thing of the past.
Most importantly, the smaller the district size, the more likely citizens were to have contact with their representatives. The more likely citizens were to reach out to representatives for help, the more likely they were to feel like their representatives did a good job keeping in touch with the district, and the more likely citizens were to approve of their representative.
The federal government and our representative, democratic political system would be made real to people.
The House already has close to 10,000 people, it just that the vast majority of them are unelected. The House has 9,500 staffers. These unelected staffers have enormous power. With a greatly enlarged House, we might not need so many staffers. Representing 30,000 people, would each member really need many district staff and comms staff, for example? One way to think about enlargement of the House: you are in effect just electing the staffers too – the total amount of people wouldn’t necessarily need to change.
However, we would want Congress to have the capacity to reign in the administrative state. The growth of power in the unelected administrative state is a real threat to our political system. This is partially a problem because Congress cannot keep up with its current workload. It manages roughly 180 executive agencies.
We should give Congress the capacity to oversee it. The strength of Congress is its legitimacy from elections, and we should play to that strength.
Finally, a larger House could eliminate the bias in the electoral college towards small states.
Each state receives one Electoral College vote for each House seat, plus two votes for each senator. Since each state is guaranteed two Senate seats, the design of the Electoral College gives smaller states a slight boost in their relative voting power. Increasing the size of the House would give bigger states even more Electoral College votes. While it would not wholly solve the overrepresentation of small states, enlarging the House would help reduce the Electoral College’s small-state bias.
Wouldn’t this be chaos? Shouldn’t members of a legislature be able to know each other?
The idea that a legislature should be made up of people who “know each other” and have relationships with each other is unfortunately a thing of the past. Currently, the House as a whole does not deliberate. Members give speeches, mostly to empty rooms and watchful cameras, with little interest in discussion with each other. The House hosts hundreds of hearings per year—417 in 2020—and members are so overscheduled that they cannot attend hearings for their own committees. Representatives have scarce time even to read all the legislation slated to come up for a vote. Party leaders structure voting. Members fly home every weekend and do not socialize with each other.
A House of Representatives of 11,066 members would not be “chaos” at all. Currently the US House has a hierarchy, where new freshmen members do not have much power. House caucuses are already more important than the Senate. That hierarchy would be deepened with a large expansion of members. With expansion, the House could be organized in all kinds of way. Regional caucuses might become very important. Caucus leaders would command blocks of votes; negotiations could go through them.
Citation: https://www.amacad.org/sites/default/files/publication/downloads/2021_Enlarging-the-House.pdf