For almost a century, the size of the US House of Representatives has remained capped at 435 seats. That number does not come from the US Constitution, which requires only that “the Number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty Thousand, but each State shall have at Least one Representative.”Footnote 1 Instead, the contemporary House is set at 435 because of a 1929 law that fixed the number of representatives, delegated the power to reapportion from Congress to the Executive Branch, and empowered state legislatures to redistrict with few federal limitations on the shape of or equality of population between districts. The Apportionment and Census Act of 1929 reflected the culmination of ten years of squabbling in Congress over how to reapportion pursuant to the 1920 Census—squabbling that delayed reapportionment so long that population figures from the 1920 Census never translated into reallocated seats despite large changes in the geographic distribution of people in the United States.
As the national population grows, and therefore the average ratio of constituents to representatives grows, calls to increase the size of the House have multiplied both within academia and among journalists, activists, and other concerned citizens. Social scientists have had much to say about legislature size in terms of both representation and policy. For example, large constituencies have been shown to result in worse constituent approval of their representatives than do small ones,Footnote 2 and democratic accountability among legislators representing large constituencies has been shown to be weaker than those representing small ones.Footnote 3 On the policy side, larger legislatures have been shown to spend inefficiently large sums because of the increased logrolling and vote buying that comes with the need to build larger coalitions in order to pass spending bills.Footnote 4 Although the effects of increasing the size of the House are important to keep in mind when contemplating reform, it is equally important to consider how the political process to enact such reform might look. This paper provides insight into the politics of legislative reapportionment by analyzing the congressional battle over apportionment in the 1920s.
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The process of reapportionment in Congress, before the 1929 law delegated to the Executive Branch and empowered state legislatures, was often quite contentions. It was contentious partially because reapportionment affects the distribution of power among states and parties with respect to both the legislative process and the selection of the President.Footnote 5 Increasing the size of the House or otherwise reasserting congressional control over apportionment would require repealing or amending the Apportionment and Census Act of 1929, the subject of this paper, which was enacted by a tenuous congressional coalition in the 1920s that was facing pressures similar to those faced by members of Congress today. In the end, the 1920s coalition decided that their only reasonable solution was to cap the House, tie their own hands, and empower state legislatures to redistrict with fewer limitations than the status quo, effectively shifting the battle over the contours of congressional representation to state legislatures, the ramifications of which are felt today with the intense battles over redistricting that take place every decade. The compromise that broke the logjam in the 1920s, however, would be difficult to replicate today because the Supreme Court has placed limitations on state legislative redistricting and independent commissions rather than state legislatures are now responsible for redistricting in several states.Footnote 6
In this article, building on Charles W. Eagles’s foundational work Democracy Delayed,Footnote 7 we consider the apportionment debates of the 1920s both to better understand the politics of the era and to draw lessons that might apply to a potential reapportionment debate today. The article is organized as follows. We first briefly compare the politics of the 1920s with the politics of today, noting several similarities and differences, each of which helps to determine the extent to which we can compare the two eras. We then provide a brief overview of the arguments raised by supporters and opponents of reapportionment in the 1920s, deriving hypotheses to explain why members of Congress voted the way they did. We then analyze eight roll calls on reapportionment in the 1920s originally identified by Eagles,Footnote 8 discuss our methodological approach to evaluate our hypotheses, and present our results. Finally, we offer some concluding remarks about the prospects of future compromises and connecting the political compromise in 1929 to the rise of malapportionment and state legislative gerrymandering throughout the twentieth century. The contentiousness of the contemporary redistricting process can be traced to the main provision that facilitated a compromise in 1929: Congress giving away its power over apportionment and empowering state legislatures.
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