How malapportionment hurts parliaments (and democracies)
Malapportionment is such a hardly used word that the spellchecker is screaming at me every time I write it. Yet however rare the word is, this thing is a great impediment for the proper functioning of parliaments, and hence for democracies.
Wikipedia tells us that “Malapportionment is the creation of electoral districts with divergent ratios of voters to representatives.” That is, whenever a representative must be elected by more constituents than one of their peers, you get malapportionment. The US and the Brazilian Senates are clear examples. A US Senator candidate running in Wyoming must win a race decided by 280,489 voters. In California, there are 18 million voters deciding the same two seats - a ratio of 64. In the Brazilian Senate, the ratio between São Paulo and Roraima is even higher - 94.
In lower houses, the problem is usually less dire, but can still be pretty serious. In the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies, for example, there’s a rule that no state should have less than 8 deputies nor more than 70. This means that a Roraima vote is still ten times more powerful than a São Paulo vote even in the Brazilian equivalent of the House of Representatives.
Now even if malapportionment is not the most popular word, the concept itself might be pretty familiar to anyone who likes to think about democracy. But the conversation on malapportionment seems to always revolve around fairness. In the interest of full disclosure, I happen to think that the fairness case against malapportionment wins hands down. I don’t see any coherence in saying that “states should be equally represented.” But that is not the approach I am taking here. There are plenty of texts on that already.
What I am arguing is that malapportionment makes parliaments less functional. And because parliaments are central to the working of democracy (see, er, “Why Not Parliamentarism?”) , this is a danger for good governance.
Why do parliaments work at all? I’m using “work” here in a very narrow sense. Why do the decisions made by a group of people in a building have such wide consequences? Remember that old Seinfeld joke:
Jerry : I don't understand. Do you have my reservation?
Rental Car Agent : We have your reservation, we just ran out of cars.
Jerry : But the reservation keeps the car here. That's why you have the reservation.
Rental Car Agent : I think I know why we have reservations.
Jerry : I don't think you do. You see, you know how to *take* the reservation, you just don't know how to *hold* the reservation. And that's really the most important part of the reservation: the holding. Anybody can just take them.
Well, anyone can make their own parliament as well. I could gather a group of people and start passing laws tomorrow and claim everyone should follow them. It wouldn’t work, of course. It’s getting people to perceive parliaments decisions as binding which “is really the most important part.”
Parliaments work because they gather some of the most influential people representing different groups in a society to deliberate about an issue and see which proposal has a greater number of influential people backing it. It economizes on conflict. Suppose each member of parliament represents an equally powerful army. One way they could try to solve their issues is by waging war. After losses on the different sides, the side with most armies would win in expectation - since we are stipulating they are equally powerful. Alternatively, the leaders of the armies could simply gather around somewhere where they could all be heard and, after they seemed that all possible mutually beneficial arrangements had been exhausted, have a vote. Since the vote would represent the likely outcome of the war, they might as well skip the war and implement the decision. This makes the voting results extremely informative.
Now suppose that the representatives in the assembly had no relationship whatsoever to the power of the army they represent. There could be a 60% vote on an issue, but that might not represent at all the true forces at play. The stronger side, in the minority of the vote, could still think they might as well fight over it. This would make the assembly much less effective than it might otherwise be.
War is of course only the most extreme version of conflict, and force the most extreme version of trying to exert influence. Power has multiple sources in society, and can be expressed through the economy, media, and activism. The rationale, however, remais the same.
Now there’s a twist. Because people avoid conflict the vast majority of the time, the highly visible decisions of assemblies, following well-established procedures, which have created an expectation of being followed, can serve as anchors on what behavior may be expected from everyone else, even if those assemblies don’t exactly reflect the real balance of power. Parliaments acquire a power of their own. With time, that disconnect may grow. This creates for room for a different kind of conflict. The people who are overrepresented in the assembly with respect to how much influence they independently exert in society will have an incentive not to have the assembly realign representation in terms of independent influence. This will often be in their short term interest (and in the long run, they might well be dead or at least not have a seat).
The underrepresented sectors, however, will increasingly use their independent sources of influence to get things their way. Parliaments will be increasingly undermined. We will then progressively lose the main value they offer, which is a space for deliberation of alternatives and assessment of forces. In the end, outcomes will be worse for all involved, including those which are overrepresented. If the disconnect gets bad enough, the institution itself might lose all its power and society may resort to true open conflict, a disastrous outcome anytime.
Malapportionment is a chronic disease. It won’t destroy societies overnight. But it can, gradually and steadily, make them less and less functional to the point it may create open conflict. So we should avoid it as if it were an acute disease. Like - and I’m just thinking of an example here - the plague?