And there it has remained, except for a brief period from to when the chamber temporarily added two members to represent the newly admitted states of Alaska and Hawaii. There have been occasional proposals to add more seats to the House to reflect population growth. Depending on which variant of that rule were adopted, the House would have had to members following the census. However, a recent Pew Research Center survey found limited public support for adding new House seats.
Our research finds that the U. We took the most recent population estimate for each OECD nation and divided it by the current number of seats in the lower chamber of each national legislature or, in the case of unicameral bodies, the single chamber. After the U. Iceland had the lowest ratio: one member of the Althing for every 5, or so Icelanders.
While much of the cross-national disparity in representation ratios can be explained by the big population of the U. Even if Congress decided to expand the size of the House, the large U. If the House were to grow as large as the Bundestag, for instance, the ratio would fall only to one representative per , people. In order to reduce the ratio to where it was after the census, the House would need to have 1, members. In order to implement Recommendation 1.
Election Reformers Network , New America , and RepresentWomen are committed to working to implement this recommendation in order to help reinvent American democracy for the 21st century. Election Reformers Network is nonpartisan c 3 founded by election specialists with backgrounds in international democracy support, election monitoring, and U. ERN develops and advocates for tailored institutional reforms, particularly in areas of U. ERN has backed winning ballot initiatives for ranked choice voting and independent redistricting and published widely in support of reforms in areas including the electoral college and mult-member districts for Congress.
New America works towards an open, fair democratic process, with equitable opportunities for full participation, in order to restore dynamism and growth to the American economy and society. RepresentWomen works to advance women's representation and leadership through research and advocacy on data-driven systems strategies that enable all women to run, win, serve, and lead in appointed and elected offices in the United States. See the full list of Our Common Purpose Champions.
Back to recommendations. Strategy 1 Achieve Equality of Voice and Representation. And on that point there is no easy answer. A number of ideas have emerged for how best to expand the House. Some reformers have suggested a one-time, arbitrary fix, like adding 50 seats.
Others have argued for a more substantive overhaul, like resizing the House based on the population of the smallest state — often called the Wyoming rule, as Wyoming has occupied this position since Matthew Shugart , a professor emeritus at University of California, Davis, has tried to unpack why this is often the case.
Of the 30 major democracies Shugart and his co-authors looked at alongside the U. Take Canada. But other bigger democracies like Brazil and Japan also have seat counts that fall fairly close to the cube root of their respective populations. Some countries like the U. And countries like Australia, India and Israel are even more underrepresented than the U.
Democracy Read more. But as the chart below shows, the House would have to grow to seats to reflect where the cube root law expects representation in the U. Regardless of the potential benefits of a bigger House, though, there would likely be steep opposition to expanding it because of some of the tradeoffs — and potential downsides — involved. For instance, a larger House would by necessity mean a bigger government and more spending.
There could also be consequences for governing, too, such as more gridlock and partisanship. Marvin Overby , a political scientist at Pennsylvania State University-Harrisburg who studies Congress and has expressed skepticism toward the promised benefits of House expansion. He also warned that a bigger House might produce fewer competitive seats thanks to partisan sorting and fewer representatives open to compromise. As such, even more elections may be effectively decided by primaries instead of general elections than they are today, which is already the case in the vast majority of House districts.
And with more safe seats, incumbents would likely have an even easier time getting reelected than they currently do. In , 51 percent of Americans told the Pew Research Center that the size of the House should stay the same, while only 28 percent wanted to expand it another 18 percent actually wanted to shrink it.
Legislation introduced in February by Rep. Alcee Hastings of Florida, a Democrat who died in April , aims to establish a bipartisan commission to examine the size of the House, among other things. But the bill has only four co-sponsors and looks unlikely to go anywhere. Clearly, there are pros and cons to increasing the size of the House, but at the very least, the idea should be more openly debated because, in terms of changes that could be made to our institutions, expanding the House is actually doable.
Smaller districts, accompanied by redistricting and electoral reform, will also create more competitive districts, which will mean less virulently partisan candidates—and, hopefully, legislators. Republican candidates running in cities and the suburbs will find it hard to be xenophobic or to oppose reproductive rights and action on climate change.
This may not end political polarization, but it is a vital first step in reforming the House. On the first matter, James Madison had strenuously argued for proportional representation in both bodies.
He believed this was essential for a strong national government. The mid-Atlantic small states—Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, and New Jersey—were obdurate: equal representation in the Senate or nothing.
The second issue was how to count enslaved persons. In , the Congress, desperate for revenue, sought to impose a per-state levy based on population, which raised the issue of whether and how to count the enslaved.
The Southern states argued against the counting of any slaves because it would keep their revenue contribution lower; the Northern members wanted to count all slaves. Madison proposed a three-fifths compromise for revenue purposes—three out of every five of the enslaved population would be counted. Four years later, during the Constitutional Convention, the issue of how to count enslaved persons arose again.
This time the issue was not revenue but representation, and the positions of the North and South were reversed. By , enslaved persons made up about 40 percent of the populations of Maryland and the Southern states.
Still others argued for another three-fifths rule—three of every five enslaved persons would be counted. Finally, they had to decide on the number of people that constituted a congressional district—and thus the size of the House of Representatives.
The second matter was settled first, when, in June , the three-fifths rule was agreed to. These amendments were the most important issues in his campaign for Congress against James Monroe, his opponent then and, 28 years later, his successor to the presidency.
He defeated Monroe 1, to Yes, the districts where much smaller then. Lesson learned, Congressman Madison went to New York as member of the First Congress and authored a series of amendments now known as the Bill of Rights. His proposed First Amendment was a guarantee that the House would begin with a defined number of members—which was not included in the Constitution—and would grow according to a specific formula laid out in the amendment.
It fell short of ratification by one state. Had it been ratified, the freedoms we now enjoy as part of the First Amendment, including speech and the press, would have been the Second Amendment.
For the next years, from , membership in the House of Representatives grew as the population increased and as new states were admitted to the Union—with the exception of , when the Congress reduced the size of the House membership. The Reapportionment Act of increased House membership from to and allowed a new member each from the Arizona and the New Mexico territories when they joined the Union. In , Fenway Park opened, the Titanic sank, and the House had members.
Fenway Park has changed, ocean liners are ancient history—but the House still has the same number of representatives today as it did then, even as the population has more than tripled—from 92 million to million. After the Census determined that more Americans lived in cities than in the rural areas, a nativist Congress with a racist Southern core faced its decennial responsibility of reapportioning a country that had experienced a large growth in immigrants. The population had grown in ten years by 15 percent, to million.
Recent immigrants lived in vibrant enclaves with their fellow countrymen. They spoke their mother tongues, shopped at ethnic stores and markets, partied at ethnic clubs, and attended ethnic plays and movies. Earlier anti-inclusion acts had already restricted immigration from Asia. Harvey, general counsel of the Colored Council of Washington, who detailed the systematic discrimination against black voting.
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