4 - Representatives

Summary

In Chapter 4, we zoom in on the number of representatives, defined as public officials who purport to represent a group of citizens. We explore why some representative bodies are larger than others, with a particular focus on the role of scale. In the first section, we lay out a number of possible explanations for this relationship, postulating that the larger the body, the more opportunities it has to represent the variegated features of a population. In the second section, we test the theory as it applies to the size of legislatures, focusing on both national parliaments and the legislatures of US states. We find that the relationship between population size and legislative size is persistent and strong. In the third section, we test the theory as it pertains to the size of cabinets, corroborating the hypothesis that population is a consistent predictor of cabinet size. In the final section, we explore the ramifications of legislative size for the representation ratio – the ratio of citizens to each representative. Our results reveal that scale explains most of what we need to know about why some countries offer smaller constituencies than others.