In part 1 we learned that our elected representatives represented many more people than they did in the past.  The claim was made that this change led to several changes for the worse.  What changes? 

Let us start with the obvious.  When an elected representative has thousands of constituents, whether she have a district or be at large, there is no way for her to visit all her constituents.  Some arithmetic.  A member of Congress represents, on average, about six hundred eighty-nine thousand constituents.  Let us take out those who would be too young to understand or value a visit by the representative, meaning that the member could leave an impression on, say, four hundred fifty thousand constituents.  

Let us imagine a room in which the member would spend twenty minutes speaking to twenty constituents.  She would need seven thousand five hundred hours.  If she never went to Washington, D.C., and worked an eight-hour day for two hundred fifty days a year, she would spend three years and nine months before she reached all her constituents. 

What is the point?  We hear often, from pundits and pollsters, about apathy, alienation, disaffection, and distrust.  A good way to overcome that is through personal contact.  But personal contact is impossible, as we have just read.  And the problem becomes aggravated because the population increases. 

Another problem.  If the representative spent all her time talking to constituents, she could not do her legislative work, which would further aggravate the problem. 

This same problem, sometimes worse, sometimes not as worse, but in all cases bad for democracy, happens at all levels of government:  state, county,  municipal, school district.  In the next part, we will look at some ways in which the impossibility of communication affects municipalities.  

October 18, 2007