4: Apportionment
-
- 4.1: Introduction
- Apportionment is the problem of dividing up a fixed number of things among groups of different sizes. In politics, this takes the form of allocating a limited number of representatives amongst voters. This problem, presumably, is older than the United States, but the best-known ways to solve it have their origins in the problem of assigning each state an appropriate number of representatives in the new Congress when the country was formed.
-
- 4.2: Hamilton’s Method
- Alexander Hamilton proposed the method that now bears his name. His method was approved by Congress in 1791, but was vetoed by President Washington. It was later adopted in 1852 and used through 1911. He begins by determining, to several decimal places, how many things each group should get. Since he was interested in the question of Congressional representation, we’ll use the language of states and representatives, so he determines how many representatives each state should get.
-
- 4.3: Jefferson’s Method
- After Washington vetoed Hamilton’s method, Jefferson’s method was adopted, and used in Congress from 1791 through 1842. Jefferson, of course, had political reasons for wanting his method to be used rather than Hamilton’s. Primarily, his method favors larger states, and his own home state of Virginia was the largest in the country at the time. He would also argue that it’s the ratio of people to representatives that is the critical thing, and apportionment methods should be based on that.
-
- 4.4: Webster’s Method
- Daniel Webster (1782-1852) proposed a method similar to Jefferson’s in 1832. It was adopted by Congress in 1842, but replaced by Hamilton’s method in 1852. It was then adopted again in 1901. The difference is that Webster rounds the quotas to the nearest whole number rather than dropping the decimal parts. If that doesn’t produce the desired results at the beginning, he says, like Jefferson, to adjust the divisor until it does.
-
- 4.5: Huntington-Hill Method
- In 1920, no new apportionment was done, because Congress couldn’t agree on the method to be used. They appointed a committee of mathematicians to investigate, and they recommended the Huntington-Hill Method. They continued to use Webster’s method in 1931, but after a second report recommending Huntington-Hill, it was adopted in 1941 and is the current method of apportionment used in Congress.
-
- 4.6: Lowndes’ Method
- William Lowndes (1782-1822) was a Congressman from South Carolina (a small state) who proposed a method of apportionment that was more favorable to smaller states. Unlike the methods of Hamilton, Jefferson, and Webster, Lowndes’s method has never been used to apportion Congress.
-
- 4.7: Apportionment of Legislative Districts
- In most states, there are a fixed number of representatives to the state legislature. Rather than apportioning each county a number of representatives, legislative districts are drawn so that each legislator represents a district. The apportionment process, then, comes in the drawing of the legislative districts, with the goal of having each district include approximately the same number of constituents.
Thumbnail: Breakdown of US House of Representatives as of January 1, 2022. Blue circles are Democratic Representatives, red are Republican Representatives and white are vacant (Public Domain; AlSmith28 via Wikipedia )