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/)
Please don’t lose any sleep over posts from heated discussions in the past! :-)
Thanks CathyWhite for providing the proposition for discussion.
When the legislature gets too large, the communication network stratifies into a hierarchy. This has already happened and would increase. The legislature enacts rules to create leaders and chairmen, and seniority is assigned great importance. What the writer is encouraging is akin to more levels of manager in a company or more officers in a military outfit.
This “problem” was already solved by the founders by federalism - don’t have your political rulers too numerous and too far away. How about we break up Texas, California, New York, and Illinois? Hell, break up the USA. I know, they can’t do anything like that fairly to really improve representation and government efficiency, because they lack integrity. So lets certainly not hire more of them.
The congress isn’t too busy if they are choosing what features and options cars, showers, lights, and dishwashers have. We have leared that a large part of our budget is just elaborate graft, payola and kickback schemes and they protect each other’s rackets. Congressmen and Senators are an expense, not a productive asset.
If you want better representation, institute proxy voting. Then each vote would assign their proxy to a representative they actually agree with, and the rep would wield the number of votes equal to the number of people who have assigned him their proxy. The digital age (databases, signatures) makes it more possible than in the 1780s. Of course you might get democracy good and hard.
Not really suggesting these things — just pointing out these redesigns would be more directed to the stated problem (requirements) than this specious alleged solution.
My problem is that for national elections, if in California 49% vote Republican and 51% vote Democrat, the Dems get ALL of the electoral votes.
Touche, my FRiend.
Gore lost his home state of TN.
We could end up with a MAGA party, a RINO party, and an irrelevant Dumocrat party.
You are technically correct, but please consider the Founders’ intent.
The Constitution does not fix the House at 435 members. Article I, Section 2 merely sets a ceiling at one representative for every 30,000 residents of a given state. The design assumed there would be growth in the number of legislators. Today, the actual ratio is roughly one representative for every 760,000 Americans — a scale far beyond what the founders envisioned for an institution meant to be the public’s closest link to federal power.
The Census itself was created for this purpose. At the Constitutional Convention, George Washington — who spoke only once — urged that representation remain close to the people and argued for a ratio of one representative for every 30,000. James Madison later made the expectation explicit. In Federalist No. 55, he described the House’s size as temporary and looked toward “a continual augmentation of the number of representatives.”
Yes, I can read. I did read the article. I’m not even arguing against the point of it. Expanding the House is not a bad idea. I’m pointing out that you and the author are simply factually incorrect when you argue that the Apportionment Act of 1929 and by extension a frozen size of 435 are unconstitutional. Neither of these are. The Constitution sets a maximum size for the House, but no minimum.
I understand that. I’m talking about House representation (the subject of the article at the top of this thread), not the process for allocating electoral votes.
Irrelevant to the claim that the current size is unconstitutional. If you want to argue that the current size is too small, I’m with you. If the founders wanted a hard and fast minimum size, I’m quite sure they were good enough writers to have included that in the Constitutionn they wrote. Certainly you can point out the arguments that Washington made as a factor in favor of expansion, but it just simply isn’t true that the current size is unconstitutional. Insisting that it is does not exactly help the credibility of the broader argument.
Expanding the House increases its cost to the taxpayer. More wared money.
I agree ,but I still come down on the opposite side of expanding house. Socialist Democrats are taking over districts by turning out very small percentages of radicalized voters. I think they’d proliferate beyond all bounds with more districts to play their games in. It might take Democrats the full 2 year election cycle to steal all they wanted to.
I agree with most of your ideas. I think the author is proposing a realistic solutions too many of the problems in our government. Congress has a lower approval rating than lawyers and used car salesmen. And a big part of the problem is they’ve each got too much power. They answer to their Sponsors, not their constituents. They get rich because they’re sponsored by billion dollar corporations. The realistic solution is for the Supreme Court to declare the 1929 Reapportionment Act unconstitutional.
On a macro scale, NOT expanding the house increases costs by orders of magnitude.
I agree it would be a challenge to argue Constitutional text versus the Founders’ intent, although it’s not without precedent:
Evenwel v. Abbott
U.S. Term Limits, Inc. v. Thornton
Powell v. McCormack
District of Columbia v. Heller
McCulloch v. Maryland
Printz v. United States
NLRB v. Noel Canning
We are thinking along the same lines. My proposed constitutional amendment.
Proposed Amendment — Modern Representation Ratio and Repeal
Section 1. Repeal of prior ratio limitation.
The provision in Article I, Section 2 of the United States Constitution stating that the Number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty Thousand persons is hereby repealed.
Section 2. Apportionment rule.
Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, as determined by the decennial enumeration conducted under the authority of Congress.
Section 3. Maximum representation ratio.
The Number of Representatives shall be such that no district shall contain more than one hundred thousand persons. Each State shall have at least one Representative.
Section 4. Adjustment following census.
Following each decennial enumeration, Congress shall determine and adjust the number of Representatives and the apportionment thereof among the several States as necessary to ensure compliance with this Article.
Section 5. Districting standards.
Districts shall be composed of contiguous and compact territory and shall be established in a manner that preserves equal representation and shall not be drawn for the purpose of favoring or disfavoring any political party, incumbent, or class of persons.
Section 6. Enforcement.
Congress shall have power to enforce and implement this Article by appropriate legislation.
Statement of Intent
It is the intent of this Amendment to:
Restore the constitutional principle that representation in the House of Representatives must remain closely tied to population size;
Replace the original maximum ratio of one Representative per thirty thousand persons with a modern standard that ensures more effective and localized representation;
Require that the size of the United States House of Representatives adjust automatically with population growth as measured by the decennial census conducted by the United States Census Bureau;
Preserve the principle of equal representation while preventing excessively large districts that weaken accountability between Representatives and the people they serve;
Ensure that redistricting is conducted in a manner that is fair, transparent, and free from partisan manipulation.
Oh sorry I misunderstood.
No worries! Your idea is still a good one!
He’s talking through his hat. A political “scientist” would recognize the states are the laboratories of democracy and federalism. The argument would start with state legislatures and population/representative, how derived there across 50 potential fields and how any of that has evolved over time, not making some abstract pseudo mathematical argument.
Great stuff! The issue is that Congress would have to approve these amendment changes, which they’ll NEVER do (i.e. Term Limits).
So our options may be:
1) The Supreme Court
2) A Constitutional Convention
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