Restructuring the House of Representatives: A Proposal for Constitutional Reform.

• Author: Holcombe, Randall G.
• Position: Reflections - Report

The Constitution of the United States was designed to create a government of limited and enumerated powers with three branches that would check and balance each other. The legislative branch was divided into the House of Representatives, designed to represent the interests of the people, and the Senate, designed to represent the interests of the state governments. The Constitution makes no mention of political parties, and the Founders were especially wary of partisan influences. The Constitution has held up reasonably well for more than two centuries but deviates from the Founders' intentions in many respects. This paper focuses on a proposed restructuring of the House of Representatives to bring it more in line with the original intentions of the Constitution's designers--that is, to make it more closely reflect the interests of the people. The proposal for proportional voting by party for representatives explicitly recognizes the role that parties play in American politics and would allow the broader interests of the electorate to take precedence over local interests, which weigh heavily in the current system in that representatives are elected to represent narrow geographic areas.

The Proposal

Voters would cast ballots for parties rather than for individual representatives, explicitly recognizing the significance of party identity in twenty-first century American politics. Parties would be represented in proportion to the share of votes they receive. For example, if a party receives 20 percent of the votes, that party would get 20 percent of the seats in the House of Representatives. If a party receives 35 percent of the votes, it would receive 35 percent of the seats. Parties would provide voters with a list of candidates who would be elected to the House of Representatives. If the party received enough votes to elect one representative, the first candidate on the list would be elected. If the party received enough votes to elect two, the first two would be elected, and so forth down the list. If the part)' received enough votes to elect fifty candidates, the first fifty would be elected and would become members of the House of Representatives.

Although this system may seem foreign (literally!) to American voters, it is similar to proportional voting systems used in parliamentary democracies around the world. One feature of this type of proportional voting is that it allows the possibility of more than two parties electing representatives. In the winner-take-all system of plurality voting now used in the United States, a party that gets 20 percent of the votes loses the elecdon and is not represented. Under proportional voting, a party that gets 20 percent of the votes gets 20 percent of the seats, allowing for a multiplicity of parties in the acting government. (1) Another feature of this system of voting is that because voting would take place at the national level, the local nature of representation in the House of Representatives would be lessened. (2)

There would be some details to work out to operationalize proportional voting for candidates on party lists, but the details are a minor concern. The similar systems already used in many countries can serve as templates for design. This paper focuses on American constitutional design and the broader effects of making such a constitutional change in the way members of the House of Representatives are elected.

Limited Government and Separation of Powers

The American Founders wrote the Constitution of the United States with the intention of creating a government constitutionally limited in power, with the power of each of its three branches checked and balanced by the others. The purpose of elections was to select those who would hold the limited powers of government, not to have the government carry out the will of the electorate. For that reason, the selection of those who held political power was deliberately designed to limit the democratic accountability of those who hold government power.

The U.S. government was originally designed to be one-sixth democratic in the sense that one-half of one of the three branches was designed to be directly accountable to citizens. Direct voting occurred only for the selection of members of the House of Representatives. Members of the judicial branch of the federal government have always been appointed and thus insulated from democratic accountability. The president--the chief executive--was to be chosen by an electoral college. Holcombe (2002) describes the evolution of the Electoral College and explains that the Founders did not intend for citizens to vote for president (chap. 3). Members of the Electoral College vote for president and always have. The Constitution of the United States leaves it up to the states to decide how those electors are chosen, and nothing in the Constitution specifies (or prohibits) citizen voting for electors. Because this paper is about the House of Representatives, it refers readers to Holcombe (2002) for further discussion about the selection of the electors, noting only that there is nothing in the Constitution that gives citizens any right to vote for president. (3)

As originally specified in the Constitution, senators were chosen by their state legislatures. That remained the case until 1913, when the Seventeenth Amendment to the Constitution was ratified, mandating the direct election of senators. The logic behind having Senators chosen by state legislatures, as James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock (1962) explain it, is that the House and Senate would represent different constituencies. The House would represent the interests of the people--the voters who elected their representatives--whereas the Senate would represent the interests of the state governments in that senators were to be chosen by the state legislatures.

The logic behind having the House and Senate represent different constituencies is that this places a more stringent test on the passage of legislation. Legislation must be approved by both the House and the Senate, which means that passage requires that the proposed legislation meet the approval of the representatives of both the people and their state governments. The passage of the Seventeenth Amendment lowered this bar in that now both houses are elected by and represent the interests of the people. (4) One can see that the Seventeenth Amendment has compromised the separation of powers as originally designed by the Founders.

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