It's a funny thing, because the point of representation is that you want to group the people together by something so you can accurately represent them, but the only thing pretty much every nation has settled on is to group them by geography.
Why is that? How much of a connection does a rich white socialite in New York have with a poor custodian from an immigrant family? Sure, their representative may be trying to bring money into their district, but beyond that is it really possibly to represent both of their interests?
What if representatives could represent based on other factors, like sex or wealth or race? What would that do to the idea of representational government?
Or what if, in the online age, you could simply decide which representative represented you, no matter where they were from? Each representative could have no more than [US pop./num. districts] constituents, but they'd hail from anywhere, in some complex series of elections?
This is a completely valid concern, and is the reason why many people believe single person electorates fail to offer equal representation. Luckily there is an alternative: proportional representation. Meaning your district would be represented by multiple people. In my opinion a well represented district should have at least 30 members (but ideally closer to 300). For example if you are of the working class, and want representation from someone to represent you that also belongs to the working class you can vote for—say—the workers party, and if your district had 100 members, that party would only need 1% of the votes and you’ll have your preferred representation.
In fact in many democracies with proportional representation so often had special women‘s parties which were voted into the national assembly when women were fighting for equal representation back in the 60s-80s
We don’t elect “parties” in the USA, we elect people. There’s no mention of political parties in the US constitution nor in most US state constitutions. This is a feature, not a bug.
Many democracies vote for parties, not representatives, and many have no geographical subdivisions that are represented at the national level.
But I agree with your point about groupings on other dimensions. I call that demotmimata. The USA used it wisely during the land reform the military forced on Japan 1946-1949. I’m working on an essay about that.
If we want cultural representation, we can create a new branch of government, that allows people to identify as a particular culture, and then vote for members of that culture.
If we want religious representation, we can create a new branch of government, that allows people to identify as a particular religion, and then vote for members of that religion.
If we want racial representation, we can create a new branch of government, that allows people to identify as a particular race, and then vote for members of that race.
If we want language representation, we can create a new branch of government, that allows people to identify as speaking a particular language, and then vote for members who also claim to speak that language.
Again, the same rule we apply to software architecture should apply here. Whatever kind of representation we regard as important, we should approach the matter directly, and not try to achieve the effect accidentally, as the side effect of some other architectural decision.
Indeed, many of the problems we see in our political system are exactly because too many goals are being overloaded on too few institutions. If this was a legacy software app, and I was brought in as a consultant to clean it up, I would immediately suggest that a dramatic increase in both encapsulation and polymorphism was needed, and could only be achieved by introducing new branches of government.
> Why is that? How much of a connection does a rich white socialite in New York have with a poor custodian from an immigrant family? Sure, their representative may be trying to bring money into their district, but beyond that is it really possibly to represent both of their interests?
Both of those vote Democrat. The middle class vote Republican.
"Among voters earning less than $100,000 (78 percent of voters), 55 percent said they voted Democratic, 43 percent Republican. Among those earning $100,000 or more, 47 percent voted Democratic and 52 percent Republican."[0]
It's possible that the specific threshold chosen creates two artificial groupings which happen to have different partisan ratios, but if a similar trick can be done by splitting the population into three groupings then I'd be interested to see those numbers.
You need a threshold higher than 100k. With a threshold of 100k, the middle class is split in both groups earning <100k and >100k. The comment I replied to said "rich white socialite in New York". These people vote overwhelmingly democrat, often finance democrat causes, and support far-left rhetoric on social issues (at least openly, but not necessarily in their own families).
I will concede that you are right about the average "rich white socialite in New York", but I was hoping you'd have some data to back your claim that "The middle class vote Republican."
It doesn't actually seem like an unreasonable claim, especially as there are so many contradictory definitions for "middle class", but I think we'd have a clearer picture if we could say, for example, "The median wealth voter in the US is 55% likely to vote Republican".
For context, here is what one source[0] says:
> Democrats have a huge advantage (63 percent) with voters earning less than $15,000 per year. This advantage carries forward for individuals earning up to $50,000 per year, and then turns in the Republicans’ favor — with just 36 percent of individuals earning more than $200,000 per year supporting Democrats.
> Interestingly, the median household income in the United States is $49,777 — right near the point where the Democratic advantage disappears and the Republicans take over.
Voting for a single letter, D or R, is very different from voting for accurate representation of your beliefs and needs.
Even taking the modern political reality, we have primary systems where one can choose, for example, a candidate that believes that Biden is an illegal president that belongs in jail and Democrats have a secret cabal of child-killers, vs one who merely thinks corporations should have lower taxes.
My point was that a single district can only be represented by one of these very different people.
Why is that? How much of a connection does a rich white socialite in New York have with a poor custodian from an immigrant family? Sure, their representative may be trying to bring money into their district, but beyond that is it really possibly to represent both of their interests?
What if representatives could represent based on other factors, like sex or wealth or race? What would that do to the idea of representational government?
Or what if, in the online age, you could simply decide which representative represented you, no matter where they were from? Each representative could have no more than [US pop./num. districts] constituents, but they'd hail from anywhere, in some complex series of elections?
Thought experiments, of course.