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Apportionment (politics)

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This article is about political apportionment. For the legal term, see apportionment.
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Apportionment, or reapportionment, is the process of determining representation in politics within a legislative body by creating constituencies. This is typically done in proportion to the population in the individual sectors. The United States, for instance, delimits the House of Representatives seats proportionally between states, who then create districts for House members to run in.

Apportionment is also applied in party-list proportional representation elections to distribute seats between different parties once they've won a particular percentage of the vote, much like how different U.S. states obtain different shares of the population from the census. In a perfectly apportionmented system, every person's vote carries the same weight.

There is no single agreed upon way of measuring Malapportionment. Using the ratio of the largest district to the smallest district may seem like an obvious way, but it does not tell us the overall degree of malapportionment. For example, in India, every district is assigned one member in the national lower chamber. The largest district, Thane had a population of 1,744,592 in 1991. That same year the smallest district Lakeshadweep had a population of 31,665. Even though Lakeshadweep was outnumbered nearly 50:1, this information does not tell us the overall degree of Malapportionment nationwide. If the smallest and highest populated districts are outliers, they could represent extreme cases where the overall country has a very low degree of malapportionment. There are many different mathematical schemes for calculating apportionment, which can produce different results in terms of seats for the relevant party or sector. Additionally, all methods are subject to one or more anomalies.

With the Hamilton method, party A with vote total P(A) is entitled to its mth seat before party B with vote total P(B) is entitled to its nth seat if and only if P(A)/Q-m > P(B)/Q-n, where Q is a fixed amount called a quota.

A popular alternative is a family of methods where the condition can be represented as P(A)/f(m-1) > P(B)/f(n-1) where f(x) is a function that, for practical applications, yields a number between x and x+1. Five choices for f(x) have received support over the years <ref>A seemingly plausible metric can be developed for any of these methods (that is, for each of these methods, a definition of error can be given such that the method minimizes the error; this is discussed in [1].</ref>:

  • f(x)=x (the Adams method or method of smallest divisors)
  • f(x) set to the harmonic mean of x and x+1 (the Dean method)
  • f(x) set to the geometric mean of x and x+(the Huntington-Hill method or method of equal proportions)
  • f(x) set to the arithmetic mean of x and x+1 (the Webster method or method of major fractions)
  • f(x)=x+1 (the Jefferson method or method of greatest divisors)

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[edit] Malapportionment

Malapportionment, or unequal representation, is broad and systematic variance in the size of electoral constituencies resulting in disproportionate representation for a given voter. Malapportionment is only possible within electoral systems that have districted constituencies - an electoral system with only one national constituency, such as those in Israel and the Netherlands, cannot be malapportioned.

It is a tendency for the size of constituencies to vary according to some factor such as geographic location. Well-known examples include the differences between urban and rural constituency sizes in many Australian states (Western Australia, Queensland and South Australia in the past afforded far more notorious examples), and the recently abolished smaller United Kingdom parliamentary constituencies in Scotland (with the notable exception of Orkney and Shetland. The UK retains a substantial malapportionment in favour of urban voters mainly because districting process has not caught up with the residential shift to suburb. [citation needed] , which currently benefits the British Labour Party[citation needed]. The effects of malapportionment vary with time: deliberate over-representation of rural Queensland changed from favouring Labor to favouring the National Party [citation needed].

[edit] Malapportionment of the United States

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The United States Senate

In contrast to the United States House of Representatives, which is only malapportioned slightly due to rounding error, for historical reasons the United States Senate is deliberately malapportioned, granting two senators to every state regardless of population size, which results in two senators representing over 36 million Californians and two senators representing half a million citizens of Wyoming. An individual voter in Wyoming therefore has 72 times the Senate voting power of a Californian. At the time the United States Constitution was written, the Senate was intended to represent the interests of the states themselves rather than the residents of those states, and thus apportionment was divided equally among the states rather than among the population at large. In fact, the Constitution specifies that the equal representation of states in the Senate cannot be changed by amendment except with the consent of all affected states (Article V). This effectively entrenched that system.

The United States Senate has become steadily more malapportioned since its creation. In 1787, half of the Senate could theoretically have been elected by 30% of the nation, while As of 2005, it would take only 17% of the nation to elect half the Senate. Extremes of representation have also increased. Virginia's population in 1787 was only twelve times Delaware's. Today, California's population is 72 times greater than Wyoming's. (see History of the United States Senate and Connecticut Compromise)

Malapportionment in the states

Many states suffered through periods of malapportionment which were created by failures to reapportion after significant population shifts within established districts. The State's legislature is historically the body which draws districts lines and apportions. Being a political body, and one which is elected, there were many legislatures who would not reapportion for fear of changing the make up of populations in districts in such a way that would threaten their reelection, or weaken their party's or caucus' political power. There are often disputes over how to redraw congressional districts in a fair way. Usually districts are only redrawn every ten years when the new cenus is relaesed. One notable exception is in Texas. In 2001 the courts had to come up with a plan to finilize the redristicing. In 2002 the republicans took power and reopened the plans for redistricting Texas.

In many states throughout the US, malapportionment had political and racial overtones. For example, during much of the 20th century in Southern States the Democratic rural areas dominated urban Republican strongholds by allowing the representation for such areas to remain constant even as their populations began to rise considerably. The result was that, in some cases, rural districts would have drastically less population than an urban counterpart and still hold an equal or greater number of representatives or senators - thereby diluting the voice in the legislature of the latter, compared to that of the former.

Several notable legal battles were brought in the early 1960s which challenged numerous state apportionment systems; Baker v. Carr and Reynolds v. Sims being the most important of these. The plaintiffs claimed that malapportioment was discriminatory and illegal under the Fourteenth Amendment. The US Supreme Court agreed with the doctrine of "One Man, One Vote" [citation needed].

One example of “One Man, One vote” has helped to minimize Malapportionment is it requries congressional redristicting every ten years. One Pennsylvania plan was rejected by courts because the districts were nineteen voters apart, in districts of half a million people. The use of computers allows the states to virtually eliminate malapportionment every ten years with the census data, howerver, it does allow for the use of Gerrymandering.[2] Durring congressional redristricting, districts may all have an equal popluation, but the use of gerymandering may lead to Malapportionmant along a political party.

Some more recent incidents are that following the 1990 census the state house of Tennessee's first attempt being thrown out for systematically overrepresenting (then predominantly Democratic) rural West Tennessee at the expense of (then predominantly Republican) rural East Tennessee [citation needed]. Also following the 2000 census, Georgia's first attempt at drawing the state senate was thrown out for systematically underpopulating then Democratic-held seats and systematically overpopulating then Republican-held seats throughout the state [citation needed].

[edit] Malapportionment of Australia

The Australian Senate is elected on a basis of equality among the states: all states elect 12 Senators, regardless of population. This leads to Tasmania, with a population of 450,000 people electing the same number of Senators as New South Wales, which has a population of six million. The senate is designed to ensure that the smaller states are not neglected.[3]

[edit] Malapportionment of the Diet of Japan

Another example is the systematic over-representation of voters in more rural prefectures and under-representation of voters in more urban prefectures in elections to the Japanese parliament. The conservative Liberal Democratic Party thus wins more seats in the Japanese parliament because its voters are concentrated in more rural prefectures.

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[edit] External links

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