Archive for August 7, 2012

Map of the 112^th United States House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives by district

When I run a quan­ti­ta­tive analy­sis, I typ­i­cally have some sort of expec­ta­tion as to what I will find. Some­times I’m sur­prised by the results. For exam­ple, in “Take 2: Could Employ­ing Tax Cuts Tax Employ­ment?” I dis­cov­ered that, while higher taxes on the top 20 per­cent of earn­ers cor­re­sponds to increased employ­ment, higher taxes on the next-​​highest quin­tile cor­re­sponds to lower employ­ment. It’s not an out­come I would have predicted.

Today is another such time. In this case, I was look­ing at the rel­a­tive rep­re­sen­ta­tion of each Amer­i­can. To explain what I mean by this requires a bit of background.

As you’re surely aware, each state receives the rep­re­sen­ta­tion of two Sen­a­tors in Con­gress, regard­less of pop­u­la­tion. Addi­tion­ally, each state receives the rep­re­sen­ta­tion of at least one Rep­re­sen­ta­tive in Con­gress, while addi­tional Rep­re­sen­ta­tives are pro­vided at a rate pro­por­tional to the state’s pop­u­la­tion. This, of course, means that the demo­c­ra­tic con­cept of “one man, one vote” doesn’t apply to our rep­re­sen­ta­tive democ­racy, even though our national col­lo­quial rhetoric reg­u­larly implies otherwise.

Our con­gres­sional struc­ture should mean in the­ory is that there is a wide dis­par­ity in the num­ber of peo­ple rep­re­sented by each Sen­a­tor, but a small dis­par­ity in the num­ber of peo­ple rep­re­sented by each Rep­re­sen­ta­tive. More­over, since the red states tend to be sparsely pop­u­lated com­pared to the blue states, one would expect to find that Repub­li­can Sen­a­tors rep­re­sent fewer peo­ple than Demo­c­ra­tic Sen­a­tors. We shouldn’t expect to see any such dis­par­ity in the House.

I put these hypothe­ses to the test. (more…)