Lee Drutman and Yuval Levin at WP:
Today’s vast districts put more distance between members and constituents in ways that tend to impose shallow, polarized, national frameworks on our society’s complex political topography. Members therefore tend to abstract away from their constituents — and those constituents know it.
In 2008, political scientist Brian Frederick found that — even given the relative uniformity of House districts — the smaller the district size, the more likely citizens were to have contact with their representatives and reach out to them for help, to think their representatives did a good job keeping in touch with the district, and to approve of their representative.
As former tea party Republican congressman Keith Rothfus put it recently, as “the number of people represented by a single member increases, each American’s voice in government grows smaller. Expanding the House would amplify those voices in our national government, thereby returning a greater measure of sovereignty to the people.”
More House members representing a finer-grained political diversity could also make meaningful intraparty factions more likely, and with them a greater possibility of legislative bargaining and accommodation across party lines.
Of course, any expansion would need to recognize that the House is intended to enable face-to-face bargaining, so it can only grow so large. How large? A group of scholars — including the two of us — convened by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences recently considered several options. In a new report, we recommend adding 150 seats, taking the House to 585 members. The chamber would then continue to grow with every decade’s census, following a formula roughly intended to ensure that no state loses seats, as was done throughout the 19th century.
That would immediately reduce the number of Americans represented by the average member by a quarter, yet the resulting House would still be a manageable size — smaller, for instance, than Britain’s 650-member House of Commons. Such an increase (that would modestly add new seats without taking away existing ones every decade) could plausibly appeal to the existing Congress, which would have to enact it.
