Sizing Up the House for Reforming Representation

The Census Bureau will release data for redistricting this August, but initial state population tallies show that several states will lose representation within the House of Representatives. The initial apportionment of all 435 House seats based on population led to reduced membership for California, Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, New York, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia. It would be incorrect to say that these states lost representation due to a shrinking population, however; with the exception of Illinois and West Virginia, each of these states grew in total population. Rather, Congress’s decision to cap House seats at 435 created a zero-sum environment where states gain representation only if they grow at a greater rate than their fellow states. The 435-member limit itself is less a choice than a historical accident from the 1920s; it flies in the face of legislative chamber size in nearly every other industrialized representative democracy. The United States should follow the rest of the world and finally allow the House to grow with the nation’s population, thereby breaking through a longstanding obstacle to effective representation.

There is nothing sacred about the number 435 in regard to representation. The Constitution and ensuing amendments never established a hard ceiling on the size of the House. The Constitution’s Article 1, Section 2 sets a starting ratio of one representative for every 30,000 people in a state, with at least one representative per state. Applying this original ratio to today’s United States, the House would have 10,000 members – probably too many. The Constitution, however, allows Congress to change the ratio of members to state populations following each Census via reapportionment.

Our current House cap of 435 seats arose from a historical accident of procrastination and gridlocked politics, which led to a hasty compromise. Up until 1920, the House and Senate successfully passed a new apportionment act every decade. But by 1920, rural states were frustrated with the increased pivot in representation toward urban areas, and House members had been trying to minimize the number of seats added following each Census. The result was gridlock, and the House and Senate failed to apportion new representatives to the various states, freezing representation at 435 members – as allocated in 1911 – and leading to great population discrepancies between and within states. The failure to reapportion also led to the repeal of regulations on how to draw districts, which stipulated that districts be compact, contiguous, and as equally populous as possible.

Progressives encouraged representatives to remove politics from the matter with the Apportionment Act of 1929, which automated the process by which the national government determined representation to states and capped the House at 435 members. The 1929 law failed to reintroduce federal regulations on how to draw districts, however, leading to some of the greatest disparities in population equality and some of the most oddly shaped districts in U.S. history, eventually forcing the Supreme Court to enter into the politics of redistricting.

An examination of the Apportionment Act of 1929 makes clear that there is no mathematical or politically principled reason for House membership to be set permanently at 435; this number was largely an accident. Due to the freeze at 435 members, the average House district now represents over 760,000 people, which will increase to over 800,000 by 2030. U.S. House members effectively represent more constituents than every other major Organization of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) country in the world. Pakistan ranks second to the U.S., at just under 600,000 people per district, and representatives in most other countries, such as the U.K., have well under 200,000 constituents. What distinguishes the U.S. relative to other OECD countries is that the size of its lower legislative chamber shares more similarities with competitive oligarchical/authoritarian nations like Russia, China, Brazil, and Pakistan than with representative democracies like Canada, the Netherlands, or Germany.

Having a high ratio of constituents to representatives poses numerous problems. The most notable issue is a break in the constituent-representative link. In Federalist 56, James Madison justified the ratio of 30,000 constituents per representative on the premise that a “representative ought to be acquainted with the interests and circumstances of his constituents.” It’s nearly impossible for today’s representatives, representing on average 750,000 people, to know their constituents in that way, let alone to stay on top of all the local issues among such a large community of people. Political scientist Brian Frederick finds that constituents in larger districts are less likely to be contacted by their representatives and less likely to approve of their representatives.  Political scientist Robert Hogan confirms that much of the disparities in campaigning in a district system can be attributed to population size; with larger districts, it costs more to reach out to every voter during campaigns. Districts are so large that constituents and representatives often feel alienated from one another.

Increasing the size of the House therefore appears like a straightforward reform. But how large should the House be? A House of 10,000 members is almost certainly too large for any business to be accomplished. As Madison noted in Federalist 55, “Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.” It turns out that most other industrialized democracies follow there a general mathematical rule – the cube-root rule, under which the number of seats equals the cube root of the nation’s population. Following the rule, 435 seats would be appropriate for a nation with a population of about 82 million. With the U.S population around 330 million, we should have about 691 House seats. A House with 691 members would result in an average district size of around 480,000 constituents, approximating the size of House districts in the 1970s. While increasing the House to 691 members might be too dramatic of a change for one apportionment, we could make strides toward such a number over time. In the meantime, any marginal increase would be an improvement.

It’s important to keep a few issues in mind. First, it would be necessary to increase the physical size of the Capitol to hold more members. While the Capitol can hold more than 435 members, as demonstrated during every State of the Union address, increasing House size to 691 members would necessitate a larger structure – a good argument for phasing in such an increase over time. Second, should the passage of a new law bring an end to the automatic apportionment, partisan gridlock could lead to failure down the road to apportion as needed. Therefore, some type of fail-safe should be implemented if the House and Senate fail to act. Such a fail-safe should not automatically freeze the House at its current size, lest we end up in the situation we’re in today. Finally, political scientist Chris Mooney finds that larger legislative assemblies tend to be associated with party and chamber leaders taking greater power for themselves in order to get anything accomplished. In this scenario, an overly large House could empower party leaders and deepen national polarization. There is little point in attempting to strengthen the link between constituents and their representatives, only to have such progress thwarted by a leader- and party-dominated House. A balance must be struck; the House should not be increased any larger than is necessary. The cube-root rule should almost certainly act as a ceiling, not a floor. 

It might be too late to increase the size of the House for this apportionment cycle, but it is a reform that should be seriously explored well before the 2030 Census and apportionment. Unfreezing House size might not be a magic bullet to reforming our national politics, but it would help correct severe foundational inequities related to representation. Beyond increasing the connection between constituents and their representatives, a larger House would make it more difficult to gerrymander and help prevent states from losing representatives should future states be added.

Undoing the Apportionment Act of 1929 is not the solution to all of America’s problems, needless to say – but it would reinvigorate the principles on which the House was founded while at the same time bringing the legislative body into the 21st century.