Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

I am not sure why you think thousand of representatives are inherently difficult to manage.





Consider that for each representative you add, each individual representative becomes less influential and has fewer opportunities to affect change. While I do believe the house should be larger, perhaps 600 representatives, once the house gets too large you simply won’t be able to allocate speaking time on the floor in a reasonable way.

The house would organize itself around voting blocs and certain representatives would naturally end up exercising an undue amount of sway because they control those blocs. With each individual representative having much less influence, they’d have no choice but to gang together to try and achieve something.


This is how every functioning democracy already works. The blocs are called political parties.

Almost everyone chooses who to vote for based on which party best matches their ideology, not based on the individual candidate who happens to be endorsed by the party in their congressional district. So it’s not obvious why it’d be bad to decrease the influence of these individuals and increase the influence of parties.


Agreed.

Political parties are natural; what is not natural is our voting system that limits is to two realistic options.


Definitely. In functioning systems, parties splitting and merging is very common, and there are many different parties represented in parliament.

they aren't supposed to be influential, they are supposed to vote on laws.

Floor time isn’t all that important. The important work is done in committee anyway (or in back rooms with lobbyists, but with 10x the representatives to lobby the value proposition there shifts a bit.)



Join us for AI Startup School this June 16-17 in San Francisco!

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: