Life in any large nation in the twenty-first century is, in most ways, different from life in the late eighteenth century. Yet the places people live still seem to define who they are, and constitute a seemingly “natural” way of organizing electoral constituencies. In the words of Tip O'Neill, former speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, “All politics is local.” But, as I argued in Chapter 1, politics is local largely because territorially bound constituencies create incentives for politicians to deal with local issues in their compaigns. Put differently, if constituencies were defined by profession, then all politics would be vocational. The question remains whether, in the twenty-first century, we can justify defining extremely large electoral constituencies for representation in a national legislature by territory.

On the face of it, territory seems just as good or better than most constituency definitions. After all, physical proximity allows constituents to interact with each other and allows their representatives to have easy access to them.