Size Is Not Our Problem
Ezra Klein disagrees with Kurt Andersen’s suggestion that the problem with Congress is that the ratio of constituents to reps is too large and somehow leads to an excess of anti-government populism, particularly in the Senate.
The framers worried about democratic government working in a country as large as this one, and it’s possible that we’ve finally reached the unmanageable tipping point they feared: Maybe our republic’s constitutional operating system simply can’t scale up to deal satisfactorily with a heterogeneous population of 310 million. When the Constitution was written and the Senate created, there were around 4 million people in America, or about one senator for every 150,000 people. For Congress to be as representative as it was in 1789, we’d need to elect 2,000 senators and 5,000 House members. And so I wonder, as I watch Senate leaders irresponsibly playing to the noisiest, angriest parts of the peanut gallery, if the current, possibly suicidal spectacle of anti-government “populism” in Washington isn’t connected to our bloated people-to-Congresspeople ratios. As the institution grows ever more unrepresentative, more numerically elite, members of Congress may feel irresistible pressure to act like wild and crazy small-d democrats.
(Emphasis added.) Ezra ably dispenses with Andersen’s odd take on senatorial temperament. But Andersen’s ultimate suggestion here is that the problem with American democracy is that America is too big for the constitutional design. And that thesis fares no better.
Some of the framers did worry about effectively governing a country so large. But a crucial argument of the Federalist Papers (No. 10, by Madison) was that the greater size and diversity of the country would actually increase the stability of the government by decreasing the sway of factions and local interests over the general government. The size and heterogeneity of the nation were in fact integral elements of the intended design. The one concern about the scalability of the design was the danger that reps would become too detached from the varied experiences of their constituencies when those constituencies become too large for any one representative to know and understand.
As for our own experiences, it’s really hard to make much sense of the notion that the dysfunctions of Congress are the result of a defective scale of representation. It is not the size of the country that causes congressional failure to enact legislation that suits majority preferences. It is malapportionment and supermajority rule in the Senate. The former is not a departure from the framers’ design, but the realization of it. And the latter is a consequence of the Senate’s own rules. Those rules may be crazy, but they’re not small-d democratic.
About Me
- I write this blog.
-
My twitter feed:
