Political Representation

    Political representation becomes less meaningful as representatives become increasingly distant from the people they are supposed to represent, both because congressional districts have grown dramatically and because the Senate was changed from representing state governments to being directly elected by voters. 

     Political representation is supposed to mean that the people elect someone to represent their interests and concerns in government. In theory, when people vote for a representative, they are choosing someone they believe will act according to the principles and policies they voted for. However, there can be a significant difference between what people believe they are voting for and what their representative actually does once elected. The people can vote for one thing and end up being represented by something very different. 

     Historically, the relationship between representatives and the people they represented was much more direct than it is today. The first House of Representatives had 65 members, with each representative serving about 30,000 people, compared with more than 761,000 today. Representatives have also always faced election every two years, keeping them directly accountable to the people in their districts. With smaller communities, representatives could more easily understand their constituents’ concerns, while those constituents could more easily know who was responsible for representing them. If a representative stopped serving the interests of his community, the people had a direct opportunity to replace him.

     That relationship became more distant as the population grew while the size of the House did not grow with it. The average congressional district has increased from about 30,000 people in 1790 to more than 761,000 today. In 1929, the Permanent Apportionment Act fixed the number of representatives at 435, so as the population continued to grow, each representative became responsible for an increasingly large number of people.

     The Senate changed in a different way. Originally, senators were chosen by their state legislatures, giving state governments a direct connection to the federal government. The Seventeenth Amendment, ratified in 1913, changed this by requiring senators to be elected directly by the people of each state. While this gave voters a direct role in choosing their senators, it also removed the state legislature as the Senate’s direct link to the federal government. A senator now answers to the entire population of a state, rather than to the state government as an institution.

     Both changes have contributed to a growing distance between representatives and the communities they serve. When one representative is responsible for hundreds of thousands of people, or one senator for an entire state, it becomes more difficult to respond to the particular interests of any one community. This raises a larger question about the purpose of representation: is a representative supposed to respond to the people as they are, or lead them toward the direction the representative believes they should go? When that relationship becomes too distant, that person they elected is no longer actually representing them at all.