Introduction

In every existing democracy, qualifications for office restrict who may run for various elected offices. Most frequently, these qualifications require that the candidate be older than a certain minimal age, that she be a citizen of the nation in which she is running, and that she be a member of the party or resident of the district that she stands to represent. Increasingly, qualifications for office are being crafted based on gender, race, and ethnicity. In the last twenty years, dozens of democratic governments around the globe have established secured seats in the legislature or on party lists for women (Baldez 2004; Krook 2006). And the effect of other rules and circumstances – such as the need for large sums of money to mount a campaign in the United States – has created virtual qualifications for office, stacking the deck in favor of some kinds of candidates at the expense of others.

The use of qualifications is hardly new, nor is the desire to use them to achieve desirable results. For example, on December 4, 1820, in a debate on alterations to the Massachusetts State Constitution, Daniel Webster defended the inclusion of a “profession of belief” in Christian principles as a qualification for office (Webster 1903). As a general matter, Webster argued, the use of qualifications for office was consistent with principles of representative government that depended on voters themselves making good principled judgments about the types of people who should represent them.

The arguments of this book have brought conceptual, historical, and normative analysis to bear on the concept of constituency in large, democratic nations generally, and the case of the United States of America particularly. Territorial constituencies may be judged more reasonable and justifiable than I have portrayed them in this book. Proportional representation, whether used in large territorial constituencies or within the nation as a whole, may be viewed with even more charity than I have presented it here, particularly because of the deliberative benefits associated with various electoral systems. And it may be that our thought experiment of Chapter 9 – the random constituency – is too radical an idea ever to be adopted. In this book, I have sought to demonstrate what can be done with the concept of constituency when it is treated on its own terms. None of many options – territorial, racial, ethnic, gender, or ideology – is an unreasonable justification for an electoral constituency, as long as it is publicly justified and well known to the citizens of the polity it purportedly represents. Additionally, I have argued that the default position of permanent, electoral constituencies that look like the nation they collectively represent is stronger than some might have otherwise thought.

I conclude this book in an unconventional manner by taking the discussion of Chapter 9, in which I proposed using random constituencies for political representation in the United States, and asking, “What would an observer of the American system observe were he to visit the nation fifty years after the random constituency was adopted?”

Imagine that Alex, a French citizen, came to observe an election in the United States. Upon her return home, she wrote the following description of what she saw:

Alex is not exactly mistaken, but she has missed the point. Voting is not the meaning of democracy, it is its central mechanism.

SILENCE OF THE LAND

On March 17, 1999, Representative Melvin Watt (D-NC) introduced House bill 1173. “The States' Choice of Voting Systems Act (VSA)” stipulated that:

1. there may be established by law a number of districts equal to the number of the representatives into which such State is so entitled and representatives may be elected only from single member districts so established, or

2. such State may establish a number of districts for election of Representatives that is less than the number of Representatives to which the state is entitled and Representatives may be elected from single member districts, multi member districts, or a combination of single-member and multi-member districts if that state uses a system that meets the constitutional standard that each voter should have equal voting power and does not violate the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (42 U.S.C. 1973 et seq.).

In plain language, the bill would have allowed states to use a wide variety of electoral systems to elect representatives to the House. The VSA would have returned to the states their authority over elections where it had been in the period just after the founding of the United States. Article 1, Section 4 of the U.S. Constitution establishes that each state has the right to choose its own electoral system provided that “Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations….” Congress has acted a number of times, most recently in reestablishing single-member, territorial districts in 1967.

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.

GENERAL INTRODUCTION

In almost every democracy in the world, citizens are represented by where they live. In Canada, India, and France, political representatives are elected by groups of voters who live in the same place, whether that location is a province, state, district, or municipality. In Germany, India, and Russia, too, territorial representation is a central feature of legislative design. And every ten years in the United States, congressional districts are redrawn, physically constituting political representation in the House of Representatives by where its citizens live. Why do democratic governments define political representation by where people live? Are territorial electoral districts commensurate with basic principles of democratic legitimacy? And why might our commitments to these principles lead us to endorse a radical alternative to territorial or group representation: randomly assigning citizens to single-member, national electoral constituencies in which they remain for life? These are the basic questions of this book.

Why were modern representational institutions in England and America organized around territorial constituencies? A good first guess begins with Dewey's description of early human history, and emphasizes the decidedly local social and political structure of early modern England and the American colonies. Before the modern institutions of representative government were formed, the basis of life was decidedly local, small, and static. Geographic and social mobility were not the norm – indeed there were significant impediments to each – and as such it was difficult to attach strong sentiments to things not locally based. Even as late as the seventeenth century, communities sent delegates to English parliament because it was by local communities that individuals primarily organized their lives. Territorial representation was originally used to represent territorially distinct communities.

The nature of territorial representation quietly changed when district lines no longer matched existing communities – when small jurisdictional lines ceased to define a distinct constituency for national representation. This happened in England and the American colonies when the population grew (or was depleted by migration) and geographical mobility increased. As this happened during the seventeenth century in England (and during the eighteenth century across the Atlantic), the justification for territorial representation changed.

At the founding of the United States, territorial electoral constituencies were an institutional habit of mind so ingrained in thought and practice that almost no argument about them appears in the literature. Further, territory was the basis (often paired with wealth, religion, or literacy) of representation in all colonial charters and their subsequent state constitutions at the founding. It is not discussed in any depth by those authors who influenced the writers and “ratifiers” of the Constitution: James Harrington, David Hume, Algernon Sidney, John Locke, or Montesquieu. Nor does it appear in the writings of the era, those of Edmund Burke, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, or Thomas Paine, in other prominent primary sources nor in the writings of the Anti-Federalists. In only one place is another method of constituency definition even hinted at: professional class.

INTRODUCTION

If territorial constituencies face the kinds of problems we outlined in the previous chapter, we need to ask, “what's the alternative?” In the next chapter, I will argue that randomized, national, permanent constituencies offer a promising one. Their promise rests upon the implications of some minimal aims of legitimate political representation, the subject of this chapter.

I begin the analysis by ignoring the costs of change and assume that we could redefine constituencies in any manner we wanted. If we were to build a large nation's electoral institutions from scratch, how should we think about constituency definition? Can there be a universal starting position, a baseline from which deviations must be justified? If so, what would that position be?

In this chapter, I argue that all things considered, electoral constituencies should be heterogeneous, stable, and involuntary, and they should create incentives for representatives to pursue the public good. These features form a default position derived from the limiting conditions of any plausible theory of legitimate political representation – conditions as noncontroversial as “representatives should be accountable to those they represent.” As a default position, these features of heterogeneity, stability, and involuntariness may be overridden by other more pressing values. But because they form a default position, the burden of justification will rest upon others who want homogeneous, unstable, or voluntary constituencies, including advocates of group representation or proportional systems.