Aug

6

For Over Five Years

Filed Under California, Political Participation | Leave a Comment

For over five years, the size of legislatures and representative democracy has been of interest. My fascination grew from a California Connected blog post published June 24, 2005: “Interactive: Two’s Company, 423,395 Is A Crowd.”

I blogged about the idea in mid-October 2005, wrote a paper on it in May 2006 for a public policy course at UC Merced, and posted a PowerPoint presentation in May 2008 that included all 50 states, amount of legislative committees and asked about trust.

Two years later this week I read an article in the National Conference of State Legislatures magazine titled “What Legislatures Need Now.” The article again peaked my interest.

I sent an email to Karl Kurtz (one of the authors of the article) and he referred me to his follow up blog post on the article. Kurtz reflects on the recommendations from “The Sometimes Government” and the ideas suggested, such as a full-time legislators and professional staff, and remarks:

Other standards in “The Sometime Governments” seem quaint: In an age when population growth has caused the ratio between citizens and legislators to soar—and therefore place pressure on the ability of legislators to serve such large constituencies—”The Sometime Governments” recommendation to reduce the number of members in the legislature to improve efficiency seems questionable at best. As many people are talking about growing the size of legislatures today as shrinking them.

And the conversation continues and reading through Kurtz’s blog posts and the comments, a thought comes to mind.

I think the we believe that a representative democracy should be representative of the democracy. In California, there are 38 million of us and most of us care about ourselves, our family, friends, and the future.

We want our representative democracy’s government (the executive, legislative and judicial branches) to promote tranquility, provide basic services and ensure equal opportunity, among other values. Of the three branches, we expect the legislative branch to be most representative of the public, of us.

A lot of folks point to term limits, the overwhelming influence of corporations, and the 2/3 vote requirement to pass a budget and raise taxes as fundamental problems that must be addressed, and they should.

However, a dimension that has been crowded out of the conversation is that of the legislative branch of our representative democracy. I believe the man or woman we elect to represent us in the legislative branch is our go to person. The person who is responsible for listening to our questions, comments, concerns, suggestions and complaints and translating it into legislation that may become the law of the land. This is the person who I look to for leadership on the floor of the Assembly of Senate on the issues I care about and want addressed.

In a world were the size of the California legislative branch is constitutionally limited to 120 (40 senators, 80 assembly members), elected representatives are trying their best to represent us: websites, online contact forms, taking our calls, reading our letters, hosting telephone and in-person town halls, and the like. But, for me, when you cannot meet eye-to-eye, face-to-face and shake the person’s hand and tell them what you think and how you feel about things, that physical connection, the visceral moment in which a bond is established, and where trust begins, something about our representative democracy is lost.

I still think, five years later, that increasing the size of the legislature, increasing the number of representatives, decreasing geographic size of legislative districts, establishing a unicameral legislative branch are means to an end and that end is ensuring our representative democracy is representative of the democracy, of us.