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Revision as of 22:48, 22 February 2006 by Qero (talk | contribs) (1960's -> 1960s)(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)- 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.
Because there is almost certain to be some degree of rounding error, different mathematical schemes for calculating apportionment can produce different results in terms of seats for the relevant party or sector. These methods include the Jefferson method, the Webster method, the Huntington-Hill method, and the Hamilton method.
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 (currently Western Australia, though Queensland and South Australia in the past afforded far more notorious examples), and the recently abolished smaller United Kingdom parliamentary constituencies in Scotland. The UK retains a substantial malapportionment in favour of urban voters, which currently benefits the British Labour Party. The effects of malapportionment vary with time: deliberate over-representation of rural Queensland changed from favouring Labor to favouring the National Party.
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, and resulting in two senators representing over 33 million Californians and two senators representing fewer than half a million citizens of Wyoming. An individual voter in Wyoming therefore has nearly 66 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 over 66 times greater than Wyoming's. (see History of the United States Senate and Connecticut Compromise)
Senate malapportionment leads to great distortions in federal spending. As an example, in the 2005 federal highway bill, California and Texas, the two most populous states, only received $77 and $36 per person, respectively. Wyoming and Vermont, the two least populous states, received $269 and $544, respectively. Alaska, the state with the third lowest population, received $1,501 per person.
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 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.
In the Southern states, malapportionment had racial overtones as 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.
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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