Constituents

The mantra from critics of the rise in the mean House district population size is that it leads to a less intimate relationship between the representative and the constituent. ¹ Beginning with the Anti-Federalists, the argument has been that it creates a situation where members are more likely to lose touch with people in their district. According to one former House member,

If we keep adding tens of thousands of constituents to an individual Member of Congress…. through no fault of his own a Member would become unavailable and inaccessible, which is just the reverse of what the Founding Fathers envisioned when they drafted our Constitution. ²

As outlined in previous chapters of the book, comparative legislative scholars citing the cube root law of national assembly size insist that the current ratio of population per representative creates an overly burdensome number of communication channels that interferes with the average House member’s ability to interact with his/her constituents. ³ It is this rationale that has led comparative scholars to propose boosting the number of seats in the U.S. House to conform to the cube root law of national assembly size in order to mitigate these effects. ⁴ Yet in spite of these claims, there has yet to be empirical substantiation that the increase in constituency population size has interfered with the representational linkage in the U.S. House of Representatives. ⁵