Posted on 06/26/2026 11:04:35 AM PDT by CathyWhite
In Part 1 (link below), I argued that the House of Representatives was designed to grow.
For most of American history, it did.
Then, in 1929, Congress froze the House at 435 seats.
It has remained there ever since.
Part 2 asks a different question: If the House is supposed to grow, how large should it be?
At first, I thought the answer might have something to do with human nature. Maybe there was something buried deep in our DNA — some limit on how many people we can know, trust, manage, or represent.
I was wrong.
The deeper I dug, the more one name kept appearing.
Rein Taagepera.
Taagepera trained as a physicist before turning to political science. He approached representative government the way physicists approach any complex system: by looking for patterns that emerge as it grows.
He discovered a surprisingly simple relationship: representative assemblies tend to approximate the cube root of the population they represent.
I understood the pattern. But I still didn't understand why.
So I emailed him, and to my surprise, the 93-year-old Taagepera wrote back.
"At first, I took this approach to be so evident that I did not bother explaining it," he wrote. "But when I did, I found that the concept still did not enter the heads of all too many political scientists."
Imagine a cube. Double the length of its sides and its volume increases eightfold. Triple it and the volume increases twenty-sevenfold. Growth is not linear — as systems become larger, the relationships between their parts change.
The cube root rule is about scale. Taagepera explained it this way:
"The gist is that we aim at minimizing the number of communication channels for one representative. Too few representatives, and the communication load shoots up in the constituency. Too many representatives, and the communication load shoots up in the assembly."
Representative democracies face two competing pressures: communication between citizens and representatives, and communication within the legislature itself. If a legislature is too large, the institution becomes difficult to coordinate; if it's too small, districts become enormous and representation grows distant. The United States — 435 representatives for 340 million people — sits firmly in the second category, and the cube root relationship appears to describe where the real balance point lies.
The Framers of the Constitution didn't know the cube root rule, but they understood the underlying problem. Article I, Section 2 caps representation at one member for every 30,000 people — a ceiling, not a mandate. The Framers weren't insisting the House maintain that exact ratio forever; they were expressing a broader principle: representation should expand as the population does.
Taagepera's research suggests that large democracies tend to settle into roughly the same balance point as they grow. For the United States today, the cube root of roughly 340 million Americans is about 700.
Not 435.
Not 11,000.
About 700.
For many people, the immediate reaction is understandable: "The last thing we need is more members of Congress."
But expanding the House does not increase the power of politicians. It dilutes it. Power becomes less concentrated.
A larger House reduces the ability of small groups and individual members to hold the system hostage simply because margins are razor thin. Political influence becomes distributed across more representatives and more communities. Smaller districts also lower the barrier to entry for new political movements. Independent candidates and third parties gain a more realistic path to winning seats. The power of the duoparty diminishes.
Engineers run into a version of this same scaling problem. As a bridge or a building grows larger, its weight increases by the cube of its size — but the strength of its supporting beams only increases by the square. Scale it up far enough while keeping the old proportions, and the structure fails under its own weight. The fix isn't to shrink the building back down. It's to redesign it — thicker columns, redistributed load, a structural logic built for the new scale.
The U.S. House of Representatives suffers the same problem. It's still shaped for a country of a few million. It was never resized for a country of 340 million.
Today, the average House member represents roughly 780,000 Americans, with some districts over a million. A 700-member House would reduce the average to roughly 500,000. Representatives would serve smaller communities, spend less time and money across enormous districts, and be more accessible and accountable to the voters who elect them.
When I started down this rabbit hole, I was looking for a number. What I found was an explanation.
The Constitution supplied the principle.
Rein Taagepera supplied the math.
A century ago, Congress stopped growing the House.
Maybe it's time to start again.
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Part 1 (https://thehill.com/opinion/congress-blog/5796470-the-us-house-was-designed-to-grow-lets-expand-it/)
expanding the House increases the number of electoral districts. It makes it harder to gerrymander. It dilutes the power of big cites, and thus Democrats.
And it decreases the need for campaign contributions.
I would prefer going back to the “1 rep per 30k”, and having 10,000+ representatives.
If 435 doesn’t do it, nothing will.
Good points. And the Constitution gives the states the power to do it as they please.
Since Senators are elected by popular vote, your concerns are absolutely invalid because the states have zero representation and senate is now a super rep with a longer term.
The ratio of senators to representatives will get imbalanced, and will adversely affect the Electoral College.
I would much rather that ratio be held than to damn the country to be ruled by the largest states population-wise.
It still affects the Electoral College makeup.
I never even knew this. Thanks for a nice study.
We were supposed to be representation by the butcher, the baker and the barber. And representatives lived in their district and went to Washington DC twice a year to vote.
After a very little research it seems it was frozen as a result of the 1920 census showing a population shift to urban rather than rural area. Rural areas weren’t ready to cede so much power to urban areas.
Moving representation closer to the people would help.
I very RARELY agree with your printed ideas, but, being the very fair and astute man that I am, I must give you credit for an EXCEPTIONAL IDEA.
THANK YOU, and forgive me for some {not all} of my past posts.
It's OK if you don't accept my apology as I have been very harsh and sometimes vulgar posts to you, but every once in a while, I go sane.
Mea culpa.
We’re talking about the House.
Yes. The original article argues that the 1929 Reapportionment Act should be declared unconstitutional by the SC, because it violates Article I, Section II (”...one representative per 30,000...”.
The Constitution placws no restriction. On the size of the House of Representatives other than that the number of representatives may not exceed 1 for every 30,000 people. Today, that would place the upper limit at 11,333 with no lower limit. 435 is well within that constraint.
It’s the exact opposite. California (for example) has 52 House seats. I’m not proposing a scenario where they’d fill those seats with 52 separate at-large elections. I’m saying they should have ONE election, and the top 52 candidates ranked by votes they receive would represent the state in Congress.
Just do the math. With 52 districts, a candidate who gets even just 4% of the votes is likely to end up among the top 20. Someone who gets 1% of the votes could make it into the top 40. #52 on the list might have only 0.5% of the vote.
You don’t think there are at least 15 conservatives in California who could get at least 1% in a statewide election?
But each INDIVIDUAL Representative would have less power.
It’s not how many people in Congress that is important, it’s how many filthy, backstabbing, thieving RINOs there are in any district.
“roughly 340 million Americans”
Actually there might be about 250M Americans.
Subtract the obvious 40M illegals (which I think is low, but being conservative).
Then discount another 50M as being either a) the children of illegals or b) family reunification citizens and LPRs who were brought in by the original cohort of amnestied illegals from the ‘86 amnesty and all the rolling amnesties after that.
I could make further comments about just how “American” the so-called legal immigrants of the last 50 years from the wondrous Turd World but why stir up the hornets nest. The other numbers are ad enough.
That said, expanding representation makes sense. The system was designed for it. Both sides seem to be interested in the idea for various reasons. Let the debates begin.
“The gist is that we aim at minimizing the number of communication channels for one representative. Too few representatives, and the communication load shoots up in the constituency. Too many representatives, and the communication load shoots up in the assembly.”
- Rein Taagepera
“The number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty Thousand, but each State shall have at Least one Representative”
That’s the text from Article 1. A good argument can indeed be made for expanding the House, but the 1929 Apportiinment Act was not unconstitutional. The text says the number of representatives may not exceed 1/30000 of the population. It doesn’t say that there cannot be fewer representatives than 1/30000 of the population, and indeed for most of history there have been fewer.
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