Note sarcasm.

And it is nice of Bob to reference my academic work. I have also looked at the cube root and applicability to the US at F&V:

“Reapportionment–a better way?”

There are some follow-up posts grafted (er, linked) at the bottom of that one.

Also, out of curiosity, I checked the size of Indonesia’s lower house, at 550 and with a lower population than the U.S. they manage to keep to the rule better than we do.

I’d guess the pace of expansion stopped after we slowed in adding new states. According to the link, the last expansion was in 1912 when New Mexico and Arizona were added. If those two had more than two representatives at the start, it might explain why they triggered a bump and Hawaii and Alaska in 1959 didn’t.

This is too bad, because — short of PR — fewer voters per representative is about the only thing that might contribute to making legislative bodies more representative of more than two dominant points of view.

Greg’s statement about practical limits probably doesn’t apply to the federal House. According to the cube-root rule (reference below), it should have closer to 700 members than 435. And the California state Assembly (the most extreme example in the U.S.) should have over 300 members instead of the 80 it actually has.

On the theoretical rationale for this, see Rein Taagepera & Matthew Shugart, Seats & Votes, Yale University Press, 1989, pp. 179-182.

Based on one local example, the parties are willing to sacrifice marginal incumbents. One of three D’s in my state’s now-five-member delegation lost his seat in 2002. The Democratic state legislature chose his district as the ‘corrective,’ packing many of his D voters into already safe D districts, forcing him to run weakened against a strong R incumbent. I’m sure there’s more to the story. What state legislators did flies in the face of intuition (i.e. bumping a sitting congressional D, having a majority in the state delegation should the presidential election end up in the House, etc).

I don’t know what arguments are actually used to counter the case for increasing the House, but we used to do it fairly regularly.

With respect to the other question, I’d wager legislative “effectiveness” has more to do with rules of procedure than assembly size – to a point, of course.

Thanks for stopping by, Greg.

So while Gerrymander is an essentially free form of incumbent protection, raising the size of the House imposes a cost on all members. I’d think this is probably for the best, there’s probably practical limits on how large a representative body can be while still being effective.