(Bloomberg Opinion) -- Should the House of Representatives be larger? A new paper by Lee Drutman, Jonathan D. Cohen, Yuval Levin and Norman J. Ornstein makes the case for a fairly modest increase of 150 seats, from the current 435. I’m strongly against a large increase. But 150? I’m only mildly against it. Or to put it another way: The pluses and minuses of expanding the House are pretty clear, but I think it’s a lot harder to figure out how to weigh them.
The current arrangement of 435 seats is a historical oddity; the size of the House isn’t set in the Constitution, and the chamber grew gradually over the years until it happened to get stuck at 435 about a hundred years ago. That size eventually wound up as a norm that no one wanted to break, which meant that as the U.S. population grew, so did the size of individual House districts. Now they’re very large indeed — and the House is very small, relative to population, by world standards.
For some, the case for enlarging the chamber is straightforward. As districts get larger, voters will tend to feel less connected to their representatives. I’m skeptical of this point. For one thing, I suspect many — perhaps most — Americans feel closer to the president, at least when it’s a president they like, than they do to their representative, and a good number feel more attached to their senators. But what’s more convincing to me is that, like or not, once the U.S. became a very large country, any hope of a personal relationship between national representatives and most of their constituents was lost.
On the plus side, enlarging the House would help reduce the malapportionment of the Electoral College, which is, after all, based on the House plus the Senate. The Senate is designed to reward small states over large ones — and, as it has evolved, it has also come to favor rural states over more urban (or suburban) ones. A larger House, apportioned fairly, would tend to counter these distortions. The authors also argue that a larger House could offer more descriptive representation for various ethnic and other groups. And they make the reasonable point that a larger House would create more opportunities for citizens to enter politics.
But to me, the downside outweighs all of those advantages. The larger the chamber, the more likely it is to be centrally governed. As it is, the House has become far more centralized than it was even 25 years ago — too much so, in the view of most experts. The committee system is much weaker than it was, which means that individual representatives have far less capacity to act meaningfully.
In other nations, with strong parties and parliamentary systems, centralization in the legislature isn’t a problem; in fact, that’s more or less the way things normally work. But Congress has always been a transformative legislature. It doesn’t merely debate and vote on bills submitted by the government. It develops, amends and bargains over legislation with only partial participation from the president. At their best, with a balance between centralization (in the form of party leadership) and decentralization (in the form of standing committees and subcommittees), both House and Senate can harness the strengths of many, or even all, their members. There’s nothing magic about 435 in the House, nothing to suggest that it’s the configuration that comes closest to allowing that balance. But if the current chamber leans too far toward centralization, it’s hard to believe that more rank-and-file members would help.
So again: A very large House, with hundreds of new members (or even thousands, as some have proposed), seems like a very bad idea to me, one that would destroy the chamber’s biggest strengths. A modestly larger House — say, with 150 more seats — seems like, well, only a modestly bad idea. The folks who put this paper together are excellent, so I do urge you to read the whole proposal. But I’m still not convinced.
For your weekend reading, here are some of the best items from political scientists this week:
1. Sarah Binder at the Monkey Cage on passing the debt-limit increase.
2. Alan I. Abramowitz on what happened in the Virginia gubernatorial election.
3. Eric McGhee, Jennifer Paluch and Vicki Hsieh on housing in California.
4. Dan Drezner on supply chains.
5. Michael Tesler on Republicans and peaceful protests.
6. Scott Lemieux on abortion after Roe.
7. Robert Farley on the consequences of Pearl Harbor.
8. And back at the Monkey Cage, Annette Joseph-Gabriel on Josephine Baker and France.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Jonathan Bernstein is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering politics and policy. He taught political science at the University of Texas at San Antonio and DePauw University and wrote A Plain Blog About Politics.
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