Help with Congressional Apportionment for USwank world

Baconheimer

Baconheimer

I've been working on a map of a USwank world. I have a map, and an excel spreadsheet with the populations of each of the states, territories, and commonwealths of this hypothetical world.

I intend to do a lot with this universe, and next on my list is deciding the size of each state's congressional delegation (so I can determine partisan control of the alternate Congress and work out Presidential elections).

I am more or less satisfied with the map and spreadsheet (maybe a few minor reworkings and population movement), but have 375 states, and a total population somewhere in the neighborhood of 2.5 billion. I have been planning to keep congressional delegations from the OTL US the same size (for my ease, actually). However, my calculations show that if we use the size of the average Congressional district IOTL (roughly 710,000), we end up with 3,488 Congressmen. That is even larger than OTL China, and seems unwieldy! This brings me to a question: does a House of Representatives of that size make sense? Is it too large, or does the fact TTLs USA is something of a world government make it a reasonable proposition?

Second, is there any really easy way to determine apportionment with a spreadsheet? I'd rather not use the formulas online for every one of 380 separate states.

Alternatively, I've considered just handwaving the issue of using an algorithm by having a constitutional amendment passed saying that each x number of people get a single representative. Does this sound plausible?

Any help or input you can give is appreciated!

Here is a copy of the map, if that helps!
ameriwanktl20172_by_chipmunken-dbx7fmb.png
 
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Philip

Donor
Baconheimer said:
I am more or less satisfied with the map and spreadsheet (maybe a few minor reworkings and population movement), but have 375 states, and a total population somewhere in the neighborhood of 2.5 million.
Click to expand...

The Senate alone will have 750 members. Given that the current US Congress has 538 members total, that is ridiculously high. You will need to bump up the size of the House to probably 7000 to maintain the something close to the current balance. Pick your house size and divide it between the states by population.

They being said, 375 states in a federation seems rather unwieldy.

I assume that should be 2.5 billion people.
 

Temeraire

Yeah, I would reduce the number of states. A lot of other countries have an additional tier. So, for example, France has 13 regions and 101 departments. So maybe have 30-50 states, with the 375 subdivisions being provinces? That would keep the Senate to a reasonable size.

As to apportionment, the cube root rule would suggest 1 357 representatives as the 'ideal' number. At the current US ratio to its cube root (435 to 675), that would suggest a House of about 870, which is large, but doable. Maybe 1 000 for aesthetic purposes?
 

Codae

Baconheimer said:
Second, is there any really easy way to determine apportionment with a spreadsheet? I'd rather not use the formulas online for every one of 380 separate states.
Click to expand...
The way I implement the OTL apportionment algorithm is as follows.

Fill a column (say, B) with the populations of the states, and fill a row (say, 2) with the quotas ((1*2)^(-1/2), (2*3)^(-1/2), (3*4)^(-1/2), etc.). Fill up a big rectangle as a multiplication table, using a formula something like =C$2*$B3. Subtract the number of states from the number of representatives to get N, and use Conditional Formatting to highlight the N largest products within that rectangle. Then each state gets a number of House seats equal to the number of highlighted cells in each row, plus 1.
 
Baconheimer

Baconheimer

Sirion said:
So much freedom and democracy....it’s....it’s beautiful.
Click to expand...
Thanks!

Codae said:
The way I implement the OTL apportionment algorithm is as follows.

Fill a column (say, B) with the populations of the states, and fill a row (say, 2) with the quotas ((1*2)^(-1/2), (2*3)^(-1/2), (3*4)^(-1/2), etc.). Fill up a big rectangle as a multiplication table, using a formula something like =C$2*$B3. Subtract the number of states from the number of representatives to get N, and use Conditional Formatting to highlight the N largest products within that rectangle. Then each state gets a number of House seats equal to the number of highlighted cells in each row, plus 1.
Click to expand...
Thanks! That's exactly what I was looking for.

Temeraire said:
Yeah, I would reduce the number of states. A lot of other countries have an additional tier. So, for example, France has 13 regions and 101 departments. So maybe have 30-50 states, with the 375 subdivisions being provinces? That would keep the Senate to a reasonable size.

As to apportionment, the cube root rule would suggest 1 357 representatives as the 'ideal' number. At the current US ratio to its cube root (435 to 675), that would suggest a House of about 870, which is large, but doable. Maybe 1 000 for aesthetic purposes?
Click to expand...
I agree that there are an insanely large number of states, and that TTLs Senate will be incredibly unwieldy. However, in order to keep this country as close to the OTL US as possible, I'm not going to change the nation's form of organization.

I'll look at your suggestion for numbers when I get to a computer, but I'm skeptical of a number as low as 1300 simply because they would make each Representative's constituent count so large.

In all fairness, TTLs US is the closest thing to a world government, so a large legislature (even if it's not 7,000 people, makes some sense).

Philip said:
The Senate alone will have 750 members. Given that the current US Congress has 538 members total, that is ridiculously high. You will need to bump up the size of the House to probably 7000 to maintain the something close to the current balance. Pick your house size and divide it between the states by population.

They being said, 375 states in a federation seems rather unwieldy.

I assume that should be 2.5 billion people.
Click to expand...
You're right that it should say 2.5 billion.

375 states is certainly a lot, but in order for nearly every one to be a reasonable size (i.e. Not out of place IOTLs US) I've had to use about that number.
 
Baconheimer

Baconheimer

Maybe I should have a thread for my fleshing out of this world. Anyway, thanks to @bagelman I now have numbers for Congressional districts per state and have moved on to working out the party affiliations of each states delegation.

A link to the master document.
 
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