US-Bevölkerung pro Sitz im Repräsentantenhaus (1789–2025, 1.–119. Kongress).
Die Daten zur Anzahl der Sitze im Repräsentantenhaus stammen von History.house.govhistorische und prognostizierte Bevölkerungsdaten stammen aus census.gov.
Für die Kongresse während des Bürgerkriegs, bei denen Vertreter abspaltender Staaten aus dem Repräsentantenhaus ausgeschlossen wurden, habe ich die Bevölkerungszahlen der Staaten weggelassen, die in der jeweiligen Sitzungsperiode nicht im Repräsentantenhaus vertreten waren.
Vor der Volkszählung von 1920 fügte der Kongress (normalerweise) dem Repräsentantenhaus Sitze hinzu, um sicherzustellen, dass kein Staat Abgeordnete verlor; Nach der Volkszählung von 1920 begrenzte der Kongress das Repräsentantenhaus jedoch aus politischen und logistischen Gründen auf 435 Sitze, wo es heute seinen Sitz hat. Das ursprüngliche Aufteilungsverfahren wurde auf Folie 2 simuliert und entspricht einer minimalen Erweiterung des Repräsentantenhauses bei jedem fünften Kongress, um diesem Präzedenzfall zu entsprechen.
Zu den zeitgenössischen Ideen zur Erweiterung des Hauses gehören die "Kubikwurzelregel"wobei die Anzahl der Sitze die Kubikwurzel der US-Bevölkerung ist, abgeleitet aus Beobachtungen anderer Demokratien, und die "Wyoming-Regel"wobei die Anzahl der Sitze durch die US-Bevölkerung dividiert durch die Bevölkerung des kleinsten Staates bestimmt wird. Zu weiteren Ideen gehört die Begrenzung der Bevölkerungszahl pro Abgeordneter auf eine feste Zahl (Washington schlug 30.000 vor, was das heutige Repräsentantenhaus auf etwa 11.500 Sitze belaufen würde), die Hinzufügung einer festen Zahl an Sitzen zum heutigen Repräsentantenhaus oder die Bindung der Zahl an eine andere Bevölkerungsgruppe.
Wenn Sie an anderen Sachen interessiert sind, die ich gemacht habe, dann hier Instagram.
Von graphsarecool
31 Kommentare
Source: [history.house.gov](http://history.house.gov) and [census.gov](http://census.gov) Tools: Python with NumPy, Pandas, and matplotlib.
This is biggest undiscussed problem in the US government and has led to so much of our f*cked up situation. Much of the last 26 years‘ worth of madness would have been avoided if the House had been expanded as the country grew. The Electoral College wouldn’t penalize large states as much, Bush and Trump wouldn’t have won in 2000 and 2016, and the Democrats would control the House.
I really feel like the number of represntatives in the house is a root cause of the political dysfunction we Americans feel with our governmental system. I am happy to see Representative Sean Casten bringing forward a bill to increase the size of the house, but feel like it is unlikely to get any traction because of the existing political dysfunction…
I never even thought about this. Definitely a huge problem. That will never be resolved.
I think 1700 representatives is too many. But the way they are proportioned is wrong. I think it makes sense to have every representative represent a fixed number of people. So every ten years the census gives us the population divide it by like 500 or 750 representatives and then the districts get reapportioned accordingly.
Gerrymandering would need to be completely eliminated before bringing in more reps to make sense.
Which I am both for.
I understand people get disappointed that reps aren’t as numerous as they used to be. But I don’t get the upside of adding more seats. The house of reps is already pretty big. More people in the room just makes it harder to actually get anything done.
There are lots of other issues (the way senators are apportioned, the way voting is handled as fptp, the way the electoral college works) that I would want dealt with looooooong before I give a shit about the number of reps.
I guess I don’t understand the argument that the House needs to expand. We have technology that can help us be more efficient in representing the population vs. what we had traditionally and more elections and more offices just mean more opportunities for grift and dilution of our voice.
If the argument is that we always need to have the 1920s level of humans handling any task at hand we would be a pretty shitty and inefficient workforce.
Gerrymandering is more of a problem than the actual number of representatives. Throw in ranked choice voting in primaries/elections and a national standard for redistricting based on a fair technology solution/algorithm and the number of reps is fine.
Is there meaning to the vertical ticks on marks in the first graph?
The problem is that conservatives think because Democrats are the ones presenting the idea, it’ll only benefit blue states.
The first session of Congress was around 1 rep per 60k citizens. It now ranges from 450k to 850k. Unfortunately this has made it much easier to find bottlenecks to gerrymander, diluting representation even more. The Senate already favors land over people, the House has slowly become the same. The 450k figure is for rural areas while the 850k number is for cities.
Yea it’s really dumb. The idea is you should be able to know your representative but most representative hundreds of thousands of people
No taxation without representation, and all that
I’m all for it. If they’re going to buy off our representatives, make them have to buy off thousands of them.
I actually think a lot of the reason why things that have passed in other western countries like universal healthcare for example is that the majority have parliamentary systems. The legislative part of the democracy has more power compared to the us presidential system.
DID YOU KNOW?
[Working-class Americans make up about half of the country. But they have never held more than 2% of the seats in any Congress since the nation was founded.](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/commentisfree/2018/oct/04/few-us-politicians-working-class)
Expanding the house would go a long way toward getting proper REPRESENTATION.
So don’t hold your breath.
The other issue is the fact that the senate can block everything if you don’t have 60 senators and every state gets 2 senators. It’s a broken system with no repair, and likely to end with the US balkanizing. Every empire dies the same way. Rapid expansion and population growth leads to large population sectors with drastically different beliefs. When these sectors aren’t given equal representation due to “tradition” they break apart and do their own thing, often better. Mind you this is the origin of the United States.
My unpopular stance is Congress need to be paid more. They are responsible for incredible amounts of budget but are paid almost nothing in comparison. Hence we get into situations where it is too easy and cheap to buy them off behind the scenes.
Just increasing the number of reps would dilute their influence, but may have the same impact of making it harder to buy the influence. Accountability becomes very hard if you have 1500 representatives.
The first amendment on the list of amendments sent to the states that became the bill of rights was on this topic.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Bill_of_Rights#Crafting_amendments
„After the first enumeration required by the first article of the Constitution, there shall be one Representative for every thirty thousand, until the number shall amount to one hundred, after which the proportion shall be so regulated by Congress, that there shall be not less than one hundred Representatives, nor less than one Representative for every forty thousand persons, until the number of Representatives shall amount to two hundred; after which the proportion shall be so regulated by Congress, that there shall not be less than two hundred Representatives, nor more than one Representative for every fifty thousand persons. “
(It did not pass, and the 3rd and 4th on that list are the current 1st and 2nd)
It isn’t productive to have over 400 people sitting in a room trying to agree on a plan. That’s much higher than the number of humans who can participate in a meeting.
If you want to increase the number of representatives as a way to distribute power fairly, you’d first need to change the operating of congress so it isn’t based around having a big meeting in the same time and place.
Remember that when the congress rules were established, there was no such thing as internet, telephone, or telegraph, and written messages took weeks to deliver. Back then, a speech in congress was honestly a decent approach for members to learn about each other’s opinions.
That hasn’t been the case in your lifetime, though. The concept of congress is obsolete.
And the reason that it was capped at 435 in 1929? Because that’s the number of physical seats in the House when it was built.
I’d be all for 11,500 representatives. It’d be far harder for political parties to have as much control. I would welcome smaller parties fracturing the two party dominance, and while the Speaker can influence ~200 members today within his party, good luck influencing ~5,000 individuals to do your bidding.
We’re supposed to live in a representative democracy. But it certainly doesn’t feel like our representatives have our interests in mind. I feel like we’d have much more fine grained representation of the people by increasing the number of reps / limiting the number of people that they represent.
Wouldn’t it be great to know that you could walk into your local representative’s office and actually have a voice, along with 11,500 of your closest neighbors? That certainly isn’t the case today when each rep has to field calls/emails of nearly a million people.
Will this fix all the problems? Nope. There’s gerrymandering, money in politics, etc etc. But it’s a step.
Expanding the house under project 2025 might be a terrible idea
This is something that doesn’t get brought up nearly enough if ever really. I remember reading something years ago discussing how the US has significantly less representation than other western nations, like an order of magnitude less. Unfortunately, adding more representatives means taking power away from current representatives, so similar to stock trading bans probably not something that will happen any time soon with our current system. Honestly I think it would be good to have some sort of system where we have some regional govt structure in between state and federal that could also help with this.
VOX just did a great video on this subject:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KhQGHY44XPM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KhQGHY44XPM)
The issue with expanding the house is that it becomes unmanageable to whip votes and write successful legislation with more people than are currently involved. Really over like 150 you get issues. One thing that would really fix matters is if we had regional congresses that allowed for legislation to be crafted at a level between the states and the federal government, and then you could have regional representatives in a smaller House of Reps. But in the current political climate a suggestion like this would cause sectionalism, and also, it would require a constitutional amendment so it probably would never happen.
Also, we need to get rid of first past the post voting and use proportional voting or single transferable vote at a national level, but there is no political appetite for this because it would weaken the power of the two existing parties.
Not to mention gerrymandering. Oh and campaign finance corruption. Oh, and…
I question the necessity of representatives altogether. There is no longer a practical need for them. Nation wide direct vote. Divide nothing by state or county that isn’t specific to those states or counties.
Going cube root is great and all — 700 reps or 81 for Calfornia.
But it could also lead to greater gerrymandering issues. We also need mutli-rep districts.
Some level of universal proportional representation (so getting rid of FPTP and gerrymandering), plus expanding the size of the house (so it reflects more what the founders intended), plus universal ranked choice voting all seem like pretty solid beginnings for fixing this mess we’ve found ourselves in.
As much as the Democratic Party would love to increase its footprint, individual Democrat representatives would not want to water down their own power … so this wouldn’t gain traction.
I’d argue against expansion due to technology allowing one rep to understand far more constituents than in the past
Is the Wyoming rule that every state gets 1 rep per the population of least populated state?