The framers worried about democratic government working in a country as large as this one, and it’s possible that we’ve finally reached the unmanageable tipping point they feared: Maybe our republic’s constitutional operating system simply can’t scale up to deal satisfactorily with a heterogeneous population of 310 million. When the Constitution was written and the Senate created, there were around 4 million people in America, or about one senator for every 150,000 people. For Congress to be as representative as it was in 1789, we’d need to elect 2,000 senators and 5,000 House members. And so I wonder, as I watch Senate leaders irresponsibly playing to the noisiest, angriest parts of the peanut gallery, if the current, possibly suicidal spectacle of anti-government “populism” in Washington isn’t connected to our bloated people-to-Congresspeople ratios. As the institution grows ever more unrepresentative, more numerically elite, members of Congress may feel irresistible pressure to act like wild and crazy small-d democrats.
It is true that until the Constitution was drafted, virtually everyone who ever thought about the matter believed that republics could only work if they were small. The genius of Madison is that he reversed that logic. Madison saw that republics had always failed because intense minorities, if they couldn't get their way, would prefer a system of government more responsive to all the people, not just the majority. For Madison, republics fail because of majority tyranny. But what, Madison asked, if there was no natural majority? If that was the case, then the various minorities would bargain and negotiate to find solutions that everyone could live with. And the easiest way to eliminate the possibility of a natural majority was to have a very large polity, the astonishing leap that Madison makes in Federalist 10:
The smaller the society, the fewer probably will be the distinct parties and interests composing it; the fewer the distinct parties and interests, the more frequently will a majority be found of the same party; and the smaller the number of individuals composing a majority, and the smaller the compass within which they are placed, the more easily will they concert and execute their plans of oppression. Extend the sphere, and you take in a greater variety of parties and interests; you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens; or if such a common motive exists, it will be more difficult for all who feel it to discover their own strength, and to act in unison with each other.
I have more to say about this, but I think I'll stick it in a second post. For now, it's just important to note that as far as Madison was concerned, size was a strength, not a weakness, of American democracy.
I'll add that there's no particular reason to believe that today's Senators and/or Members of the House are any less representative than were those of the past. Anderson says that Congress "grows ever more unrepresentative," but why should we think so? Certainly the electorates are a lot closer to the democratic ideal of the whole people than they ever were before (most felons, non-citizens, and the pre-18 crowd are all that are formally excluded, and while the actual electorate is not a perfect match for all eligible voters, it's surely a better match now than it was in the past). For better or worse, Members of Congress are much better able to know what their constituents are thinking than they were before polling, modern communications, and modern transportation put them in constant touch with their districts. The Senate remains malapportioned (and that one can't be defended on democratic grounds), but one person, one vote is the law of the land in the House -- another relatively recent (post-1960) development. On the whole, it seems to me that today's Congress is certainly much more representative of (and/or provides better representation for) the underlying population than the 1960 Congress, the 1910 Congress, the 1860 Congress, or the 1810 Congress.
The Senate not only *remains* malapportioned, it's more malapportioned now than at the founding. As Sanford Levinson (and more recently James Fallows) have pointed out, CA today has 69x the population of Wyoming, whereas at the founding, most-populous VA had 10x the population of least-populous DE.
ReplyDeleteAlso, while the House is mathematically proportionate, gerrymandering may polarize the district electorates and so the candidates.
Ah, we have research on these: the malapportionment in the Senate matters only a little, and gerrymandering in the House doesn't cause polarization. On the former, the way the Senate is put together does help certain interests, but not one party or the other.
ReplyDelete(Sorry, I'm gonna be lazy and not cite specifics. Bad blogger).
i agree that federalist 10 contains a number of arguments to show that a large republic is not doomed, and may even have some advantages.
ReplyDeletei'm less convinced that madison himself believed these arguments.
there were many other reasons for advancing a consolidation of the states--the loose federation had failed decisively. i do not suggest that madison was in any way insincere in advocating for the new constitution.
but the arguments that madison advances for the alleged advantages of a larger republic strike me as half-hearted rationalizations rather than as cogent responses to the traditional worries about size.
kid bitzer
This is correct, I think, but there's a lot here that can be expanded upon. For one thing, I think it can easily be argued that Madison was flat out wrong. Toqueville and Hartz largely do that, but the better example are African Americans for whom demographic variety did little to staunch the tide of racism and discrimination of a tyrannical majority. Perhaps the better question is how parties fit into this picture. Infamously Madison doesn't really talk about that. But one role parties have, if I am remembering John Aldrich correctly, is 'simplifying' politics in some sense, by forcing issues to a single dimension. In some sense doesn't that disrupt the argument - are the multitude of interests competing in the way envisioned by Madison or is the two-party representation of that conflict too simplistic such that it falls on its face? I think this brings up the fact that Madison's argument for a larger republic is largely instrumental - he isn't arguing for size per se but for size under certain demographic conditions (and institutional ones - we can also ask why we even need separation of powers if demographics are sufficient but that's another discussion).
ReplyDeleteIt's interesting though that he thought a large Republic would have multiple parties. In fact there are two and everyone else is out in the cold. There are many interest groups but they tend to sort into one of the two parties at any given time and some have been locked into one political party or another for generations.
ReplyDelete