Abstract
Representative democracy is for the people, by the people. But what happens when the connection between the people’s representative and their constituents erodes over time due to increased population and district size? The United States House of Representatives’ membership has been capped at 435 for almost 100 years leading to an increase in the average district size from 280,875 in 1930 to 761,169 in 2020. House membership and constituents represented by each member is out of balance, causing a decrease in representative democracy, large over and underrepresented district disparities, and feelings of disenfranchisement by citizens. Therefore, this paper premises that House membership should be increased using a new method, the Least Populous State Solution (“LPSS”), which increases House membership with population growth but pegs the ideal district size to the least populous state’s population. LPSS was developed by analyzing other representative democracies, examining Supreme Court precedent, and studying other solutions to growing House membership as detailed in this paper. LPSS requires that interstate Congressional districts are with 10% of the population of the ideal district size (with some exceptions), which is in line with Supreme Court precedent related to intrastate district population size and other near peer democracies. A detailed application and anal- ysis of the LPSS is described in this paper and shows that both political parties stand to benefit from increasing the House size under LPSS.
Recommended Citation
Jennifer Kindred Mitchell, Why Not More Seats? Increasing the House of Representative's Size Using the Least Populous State Solution, 44 Pace L. Rev. 193 (2024)DOI: https://doi.org/10.58948/2331-3528.2086
Available at: https://digitalcommons.pace.edu/plr/vol44/iss2/1