Alex Small wrote:
I've been following some of the apportionment threads, and wanted to pose a related question: Is there an optimal legislature size from the standpoint of apportionment?
If you look at this from an optimization perspective, you have one objective that pulls in the direction of having as large a size as possible - and this objective is having as great representation as possible. In order for the answer to be anything less than "as large as possible", there must be some sort of counteracting force that increases as you get smaller.
The question, then, is "what is this force?"; and for that, I don't know. I have given some ideas earlier (such as the increasing difficulty, from a single representative's POV, in knowing about all the other representatives, as size increases), but even if these were the counteracting forces, it is not clear how strong they should be. There's a commensurability problem: how much does one additional representative count with respect to increased proportionality, and in contrast, how much "penalty" does one additional representative carry from the point of view of making the legislature unwieldy?
The questions don't seem to have clear answers, and therefore each nation has more or less chosen the distribution according to what "seems right", or by accumulation of historical inertia.
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