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You have to be very cautious with this approach. The intent is not that you are nominating a faceless member of a party to the office, but an individual that yo

You have to be very cautious with this approach. The intent is not that you are nominating a faceless member of a party to the office, but an individual that you hold personally accountable for their political actions. Removing districts means that you are moving to statewide elections, and then it becomes a statewide office rather than a local office, which is not the intent. The better solution is to make the scarce resource less so; limit districts to 60k people (i.e. pre-Reapportionment Act levels) and expand the house of representatives correspondingly. Then this problem mostly becomes moot. The other problem, of having ~5000 people in the house of representatives, presents additional challenges, naturally, but the house has the power to set its rules so it can put more work on committees (which can have additional specialization levels) and less work on floors.

scarmig 6y ago
> The intent is not that you are nominating a faceless member of a party to the office The "intent"? Whose intent? Regardless, that's not how modern elections work. The strongest predictor of vote, by a wide margin, is partisan affiliation. Candidates (on both sides!) who are known for exceptional constituent services are regularly voted out for faceless party hacks. When people do switch their votes, it's a consistent shift up and down the ballot. The days when representatives carefully pursued their local constituents' interest are long gone: consider how Californian Republican representatives voted to hike their own property owning constituents' taxes in 2017. It doesn't make sense to have local elections, because politics isn't local now.
- andrewla 6y ago
  > The strongest predictor of vote, by a wide margin, is partisan affiliation I mean, I guess I think this is a problem, rather than something that we should encode structurally into the system. I personally would prefer reforms that push back in the local direction. Right now there is a very small number of heterodox senators (Manchin, maybe Sanders, any others?) and a larger number of heterodox reps. To lower those barriers to make it more feasible for people to run for national office as a representative would be a vast improvement.
  - scarmig 6y ago
    I don't disagree that creating a much larger House would lead to better representation and better constituent services. It's also probably one of the most feasible approaches we could take to electoral reform. So, pragmatically we see eye to eye. I predict it wouldn't change the tendency toward governance by party hacks, though. That's an effect, not a cause. The root cause is that residents of geographically contiguous regions don't represent a shared interest in the same way they did in the past: there are different dividing lines nowadays.
jedberg 6y ago
You may be interested in the cube root rule (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cube_root_rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cube_root_rule) which strikes a nice balance between number of people represented and number of people in the House.

scarmig 6y ago

> The intent is not that you are nominating a faceless member of a party to the office The "intent"? Whose intent? Regardless, that's not how modern elections work. The strongest predictor of vote, by a wide margin, is partisan affiliation. Candidates (on both sides!) who are known for exceptional constituent services are regularly voted out for faceless party hacks. When people do switch their votes, it's a consistent shift up and down the ballot. The days when representatives carefully pursued their local constituents' interest are long gone: consider how Californian Republican representatives voted to hike their own property owning constituents' taxes in 2017. It doesn't make sense to have local elections, because politics isn't local now.

andrewla 6y ago
> The strongest predictor of vote, by a wide margin, is partisan affiliation I mean, I guess I think this is a problem, rather than something that we should encode structurally into the system. I personally would prefer reforms that push back in the local direction. Right now there is a very small number of heterodox senators (Manchin, maybe Sanders, any others?) and a larger number of heterodox reps. To lower those barriers to make it more feasible for people to run for national office as a representative would be a vast improvement.
- scarmig 6y ago
  I don't disagree that creating a much larger House would lead to better representation and better constituent services. It's also probably one of the most feasible approaches we could take to electoral reform. So, pragmatically we see eye to eye. I predict it wouldn't change the tendency toward governance by party hacks, though. That's an effect, not a cause. The root cause is that residents of geographically contiguous regions don't represent a shared interest in the same way they did in the past: there are different dividing lines nowadays.

jedberg 6y ago

You may be interested in the cube root rule (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cube_root_rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cube_root_rule) which strikes a nice balance between number of people represented and number of people in the House.