The Constitution directs Congress to reapportion seats in the House

Transcription

1 12C - Apportionment: The House of Representatives and Beyond For the U.S. House of Representatives, is a process used to divide the available seats among the states. More generally, apportionment is the process used to divide any set of people or objects among various individuals or groups. The Constitutional Context The Constitution specifies a single method of apportionment for senators: Each state gets two. The 17 th Amendment (1913) changed the method of selecting senators from chosen by state legislature to chosen by direct election of the people. The Constitution mandates that seats in the House be apportioned to the states according to their population, subject to a. Congress sets the total number, so long as the total number does not exceed The Constitution directs Congress to reapportion seats in the House The Constitution for apportionment. Example 1 pg 681 The House currently has 435 representatives, and the 2000 census reported a U.S. population of 281 million. On average, how many people are represented by each representative? Suppose that the total number of representatives were the constitutional limit of one for every 30,000 people. How many representatives would there be in that case? The Apportionment Problem An example: Rhode Island has a population of 1,050,000, which is. Should Rhode Island have 1, or rather 2, representatives? 1

2 The Standard Divisor and Quota The is the average number of people per seat (in the House) for the entire population of the U.S. Standard Divisor = The for a state is the number of seats it would be entitled to if fractional seats were allowed. Standard quota = (The standard divisor and standard quota also apply to apportionment problems besides the House. Simply replace the number of seats by the number of items to be apportioned and the state and total populations by the relevant populations in the problem.) Example 2 pg 682 The 2000 census found a population of 902,000 for Montana and 494,000 for Wyoming. Find the standard quota for each state. Example 3 pg 683 A small school district is reapportioning its 14 elementary teachers among its three elementary schools, which have the following enrollments: Washington Elementary, 197; Lincoln Elementary, 106 students; Roosevelt Elementary, 145 students. Find the standard quota of teachers for each school. 2

3 The challenge of apportionment Consider a simpler example: States A, B, C, D with populations as shown. Form legislature of 100 seats. Standard divisor = 10000/100 = 100 A B C D Total Pop ,000 St Quota If we round down, all decimals are less than 0.5, we would have Who gets another representative? Hamilton s Method Applying Hamilton s to the above example: 3

4 The first presidential veto In 1792, President Washington issued the first veto in our history. He vetoed the bill to use Hamilton s method of apportionment. (See pg 686 for Washington s objection.) Fairness issues with Hamilton s Method Reintroduced in 1850, passed, used until Several problems emerged. Most famous Alabama paradox. In a fair apportionment system, adding extra seats must not result in fewer seats for any state. The Alabama paradox occurs when the total number of available seats increases, yet one state (or more) loses seats as a result. When apportionment changes because of population growth, we would expect fastergrowing states to gain seats at the expense of slow-growing states. When the opposite occurs a slow-growing state gains a seat at the expense of a faster-growing state we have the population paradox. When additional seats are added to accommodate a new state, we do not expect this addition to change the apportionment for existing states. If it does, we have the new state paradox. Example 5 pg 687 Using Hamilton s method, recomputed the apportionment in the 4-state example if there are 101 seats instead of

5 Jefferson s method Used between 1792 and Trial-and-error to find a divisor that works. 5

6 Is Jefferson s method fair? The Quota Criterion: For a fair apportionment, the number of seats assigned to each state should be its standard quota rounded either up or down to the nearest integer. Example 6 pg 690 Consider a four-state legislature with 100 seats in which the states have the following populations: A 680; B 1626; C 1095; D Use Jefferson s method to apportion the 100 seats. Is the quota criterion satisfied? Other apportionment methods Webster s method used from similar to Jefferson s method except seeks to find modified quotas that give the correct total number of seats by using standard rounding rules. Hill-Huntington method used from 1940 present similar to Jefferson s and Webster s except rounding up/down is based on the geometric mean of the integers on either side of the modified quota. (geometric mean of two numbers x and y is x " y 6