With 435 members, does Congress accurately represent the people? Larry Sabato, Founder of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, discusses this and other interesting topics in his book A More Perfect Constitution.
At the Constitutional Convention of 1787, Washington proposed reducing the number of citizens per Congressman from 40,000 to 30,000. Madison, writing in The Federalist Papers, predicted that at current population growth rates, the size of the House of Representatives would grow from 65 members to over 400 members by the 1830s.
Our current House of Representatives, at 435 members, has 690,000 citizens per Congressperson. To compare, each Member of the 646 member British House of Commons represents 91,000. Even the members of the 577 member French National Assembly represents 102,000 people.
Of course, we can’t return to the original number of 30,000 citizens per representative, as that would generate a deliberative body of over 10,000. But clearly, an expansion could have positive benefits on the representative power of the house. Even conservative commentator George Will has argued for a number around 1,000.
With a wealth of topics presented, I’ll discuss other proposals in the book later.
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