Political representation in the United States reflects a central tension of American democracy. On the one hand, America is a democratic form of government. Democracy requires a close connection between the citizens and laws that govern them. On the other hand, from the time of its founding, the size of the nation has prohibited all but a very small minority to write and pass legislation. Thus, political representation provides the connective tissue between the democratic rule of American citizens and the aristocratic lawmaking of members of Congress, the executive, and the judiciary.
There are four key areas that are central to the history of representation in the United States: voting rights; electoral rules for the House; rules for the Senate; and nonlegislative political representation in the executive, judiciary, and interest groups.
The Right to Vote
The right to vote is a legal right that defines which groups or types of people shall be included or excluded from choosing representatives. Because the size of the electorate is so large that a single vote in any election for national office is unlikely to affect the outcome of an election, the right to vote is a powerfully symbolic expression of the nation's judgment about what qualifies as full democratic citizenship.
As early as 1763, the concept of political representation has been closely tied to the right to vote and the legitimacy of government through the colonial protests against the Stamp Act. In that case, the English Parliament justified taxing their colonial "subjects" because colonial interests were said to be "virtually" represented in Parliament. The rejection of this argument was summed up in the apocryphal "no taxation without representation"—the demand that taxes could only be legitimately levied by legislators who themselves were accountable to the voters whom they taxed.
At the founding, the right to vote for members of the U.S. House of Representatives was determined by state law. Anyone who could legally vote for a member of their own state's "most numerous branch of the State Legislature" was granted the right to vote for members of the House. In practice, this meant that voting requirements varied between states and that virtually all voters were white males, with some minimal financial means.
The decision to exclude groups of voters rested on principled and prejudicial grounds. In principle, the right to vote was denied to groups of citizens when that group was judged to lack wisdom, political independence, and a demonstrated stake in society. Prejudicially, this meant that nonwhite "citizens," slaves, women, and children, and in a few cases Jews, Catholics, and other non-Protestants, were, with some notable exceptions, denied the vote. Today children, felons (in some states), and noncitizens are denied the vote precisely because they are judged to lack the political maturity (or, in the case of felons, they have given up their rights) of full citizenship.
Voting laws since the founding of the United States were increasingly restrictive until roughly the period of Reconstruction. Women in New Jersey, for example, were allowed to vote until formally "disenfranchised" in 1807. In many states, laws were added post-founding that explicitly restrict the suffrage to white men. But it is less clear whether these restrictions in practice eliminated many voters from the rolls. In general, laws are not passed until legislators perceive a need—for example, the emergence of speed limits during the twentieth century is not evidence that anyone in nineteenth-century America was traveling 60 mph on a highway. Speed limits were instead a response to the new automobile. Similarly, it is quite likely that voting restrictions appeared in the early nineteenth century only when women, blacks, immigrants, and others began to take advantage of the unintended openness of local voting laws. Thus newly codified restrictions on suffrage through the early nineteenth century may have been more properly understood not as a formal "taking away" of rights but rather as a codification of the underlying but unstated intention. In any case, the restrictions were certainly a symbolic offense.
After this initial contraction, voting laws expanded during a century of progress, beginning with the Constitutional amendments passed at the start of Reconstruction. The Fourteenth Amendment (ratified 9 July 1868) was the first Constitutional enactment that linked citizenship rights to the right to vote for any "male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State." But the linkage was in the form of a penalty for noncompliance rather than a guarantee of a right to vote. States were still allowed to restrict their citizens from voting, but if they did so, they would receive fewer representatives in Congress directly proportionate to those whom they disenfranchised. The Fifteenth Amendment (ratified 3 February 1870) made such infringement illegal, providing an explicit guarantee, "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color or previous condition of servitude."
While the Fifteenth Amendment ended legally sanctioned racial discrimination at the ballot box, state laws were enacted that made voting by former slaves and other nonwhites difficult, if not impossible. Literacy tests and poll taxes were legally allowed but unevenly applied to white and nonwhite citizens. Intimidation and informal coercion ensured that voting by blacks in particular would be treacherous even if they could pass the legal tests. Only through the various Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s, particularly the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (extended and expanded in 1982), did the law guarantee blacks the right to vote.
While blacks formally received the right to vote just after the Civil War, women had to wait until 1920, the United States being the last of the then-industrialized nations to so extend its suffrage. The move for national voting rights for women began in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848 by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, and Susan B. Anthony. Illustrating the earlier point that law is enacted in response to perceived need, debate around the Fourteenth Amendment resulted in the adoption of the first reference to gender in the U.S. Constitution. By the period of Reconstruction, women were seen as a sufficient "threat" that the word "male" qualified the linkage between citizens and voting rights in the language of that amendment.
In 1890, the women's movement unified to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). While earlier campaigns had emphasized the equal standing of women and men, NAWSA engaged a new strategy: women had distinctive qualities that were themselves worthy of political representation. After an initial and failed strategy on making state-level changes in voting rights in 1915, they shifted their efforts toward a Constitutional amendment. Buoyed by both major political parties believing they stood to benefit most from the new electorate, the Nineteenth Amendment was adopted on 18 August 1920, guaranteeing voting rights to all citizens regardless of sex.
The last major expansion of the right to vote reduced the age of suffrage from twenty-one to eighteen. The age restriction again reflected the principle that only those of political maturity should be given the right to vote. The establishment of the age of twenty-one as the start of political maturity had been adopted in the American colonies from English practice and was the age restriction on every state voting law through the late 1960s. A political movement to decrease the voting age to eighteen emerged during almost every U.S. war because boys under twenty-one were ordered by their government to risk their lives. Although a Constitutional amendment had been proposed in 1942 by Senators Arthur Vandenberg and Jennings Randolph, it never made it out of committee. Indeed, while there were some proposals among state governments to lower the voting age during World War II, only Georgia succeeded in doing so. While there was some movement on the issue during the 1950s, the push to extend the suffrage to younger voters finally succeeded during the Vietnam War. An outgrowth of the social and political youth movements that arose during this time, Democrats and Republicans soon began campaigning to reduce the age of political maturity to eighteen. In 1970, as part of the expansion of the Voting Rights Act, Congress reduced the age of voting in all elections to eighteen.
Many, however, thought such a law was unconstitutional. The Supreme Court in Oregon v. Mitchell ruled in a 5 to 4 decision that the law was only constitutional when applied to federal elections. Following that decision there existed a two-tiered voting system in the United States: for federal elections, anyone over eighteen years could vote; with few exceptions, twenty-one was still the age of majority for state and local elections. Because of the cost of administering such a system, as well as the political sentiments that had been brewing, the Twenty-sixth Amendment, formally reducing the age of voting to eighteen, was adopted on 1 July 1971.
Representation in the House: Apportionment and Districting
Representation in the House of Representatives is determined by two features of the U.S. political landscape: apportionment and districting.
Apportionment. Apportionment refers to the number of representatives in the House of Representatives that each state receives based on its population. By linking representation to population, the House of Representatives was created as a body that represented individual persons. At the founding, each state was apportioned no more than one representative for every thirty thousand inhabitants, with a minimum guarantee of one representative each. How an "inhabitant" is counted has varied widely by state, and has sometimes included citizens and noncitizens.
Infamously, the U.S. Constitution did not include Native Americans in this count and only counted "three-fifths" of each slave. It is this clause (Article I, Section 2) that some people point to as evidence that the founders thought blacks were only three-fifths human. But this attribution of three-fifths human is apocryphal, and ignores the effects of the clause: were slaves to be counted as full persons for the sake of apportionment, southern states would have been apportioned that many more representatives and thus given that much more political power in Congress. Indeed, it was slave owners in the South who advocated counting each slave as a whole person. And it was abolitionists—people who thought slaves were both fully human and unjustly bound to a wicked institution—who wished not to count slaves at all. A compromise of three-fifths emerged between the two sides because the number of "inhabitants" also determined how much each state owed the federal government in taxes.
The ratio of population to representatives would determine how large or small the legislature would be. James Madison had earlier warned that the size of a legislature was independent of the underlying population. It must be large enough "to guard against the cabals of a few" but small enough "to guard against the confusion of a multitude" and the first Congress after the first apportionment saw a body of 106 members. But because the size of Congress was linked to population size, as the latter grew, so did the legislature, though in decreasing speed. By the turn of the twentieth century, the U.S. House of Representatives had more than quadrupled its size, and in the second decade passed a law to fix the number of seats at 435. That number has been maintained since, with the exception of the period just after Alaska and Hawaii were admitted to the union, when the number of House members briefly rose to 437.
Districting. While apportionment determines how many of the 435 representatives each state will receive, districting refers to drawing of electoral constituencies within each state. An "electoral constituency" is simply a group of people who vote for a particular seat. Electoral constituencies had originally been territorial because of the close affinity between where people lived and the set of political interests important to them. In the colonies, all political representation was based on the town, parish or county in which a citizen lived, a practice adopted from English political life going back at least as far as the Magna Charta. This practice well suited early American political life since populations tended not to be a mobile as they later would be, and the ratio between population and representatives could be relatively small.
Yet when the U.S. Congress was proposed, both opponents and supporters realized the nature of territorial representation would fundamentally change. A ratio of one representative to thirty thousand people—the minimum size of any Congressional district—was a roughly tenfold increase in the average size of the state electoral district. Even if citizens found their affinities close to home, the congressional district was far too big to represent them in the way it had in their state and colonial governments. Opponents of the Constitution saw the large size of the congressional district as undermining the "strong chords of sympathy" that representatives needed to have with their constituents, and undermining of the communal bonds that had justified territorial representation in the first place. Advocates of the Constitution admitted that the large district would make it much more difficult for constituents to attach to their national representative but viewed this to be a salutary check—representatives would have to earn their constituents' respect based on the quality of their service to the nation. Furthermore, as James Madison famously argued in "Federalist 10," large congressional districts would tend to check the emergence of electoral factions at the district level, allowing, he hoped, the emergence of people who would have strong incentives to act in the public good in order to get reelected.
Founding intent did not accurately predict the response within the states to the newly enacted federal laws. First among the unforeseen consequences of the institutional rules of the U.S. Constitution was the rise of political parties. Political parties essentially group together many different kinds of interests in order to represent them more efficiently in Congress. Their effect on political representation was direct: many states continued more forcefully the English and colonial practice of drawing district lines to maximize party advantage. In 1812, the Massachusetts legislature approved a districting map that was lampooned by a newspaper cartoonist who accentuated the features of its shape, making it appear as a salamander. Despite Governor Elbridge Gerry's reluctant support for the map, the cartoonist nevertheless labeled it after him, and thus arose the term "gerrymander."
A second response to the institutions of political representation was the creation of multi-member, statewide districts. During the first fifty years of the republic, party affiliation mapped closely to geographical location: Federalists and Whigs, for example, commanded much of the coastal and city votes, while Democrats were far more popular in the rural sections of each state. Single-member territorial districts ensured that these geographical differences were represented in Congress. Sensing an opportunity for greater influence, states began electing their delegations as a whole, through majority vote. Thus, states with a small majority of one party or another were able to elect and send a congressional delegation all of one party. Since 1842, electoral constituencies have been single-member districts by law, although violations of that and subsequent "single-member laws" were not unusual and seldom challenged. With some notable exceptions, representatives to the House have been elected in "single-member districts" by "first past the post" rules ever since.
Finally, during the industrial period of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, rural Americans moved into cities, as did a continued influx of immigrants. This had unexpected consequences for political representation in the United States. Urban centers became more heavily populated relative to rural towns but district lines were not redrawn; the effect was to "over-represent" people in less populated rural areas relative to their urban counterparts. By the middle of the twentieth century, there were great disparities in district size: some rural congressional districts had only tens of thousands of people, other urban districts were ten times or more that size.
Advocates in Illinois and Tennessee, among other states, sued their respective states arguing that, coming from cities, they did not receive fair representation. After rejecting the argument in the 1940s and 1950s on the basis that districting was a "political question" and not for them to decide, the Supreme Court argued in Baker v. Carr (1962) that the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment required districts to be of roughly equal size. Writing in his last dissent on the bench, Justice Felix Frankfurter argued that the Fourteenth Amendment could not possibly apply to this case because it provided its own remedy for voting irregularities. Nevertheless, in 1964, in a collection of cases headed by Reynolds v. Sims, the Court established its standard of "one-person-one-vote," ultimately requiring states to come as close to equality of population between districts, and requiring them to redistrict every ten years.
The history of the redistricting cases up to that point was a remnant of the urban-rural split that emerged in the twentieth century and was largely unrelated to civil rights issues. Only after the decision in Reynolds v. Sims was the concept "one-person-one-vote" used as a forceful weapon in the fight for minority voting rights in the Voting Rights Acts of 1965 and 1982, and the upholding of much of their law by the Supreme Court. Increasingly, this has meant that districts can be drawn not only to equalize population, but also to produce desired electoral outcomes, particularly the securing of electoral success for minority candidates.
Representation in the Senate
The House of Representatives had been conceived of as a body to represent the people of the United States. In contrast, the U.S. Senate was animated by a very different conception of political representation. Emerging out of the "great compromise" during the Constitutional Convention of 1787, the Senate had originally been modeled on the House of Lords in England—as an aristocratic "upper house" meant to provide a more reflective space in which its members could check the cruder ambitions of the lower house. Much of these "aristocratic" origins of the institution still remain: members of the Senate serve longer terms than those in the House (six years to two years respectively); they must be an older minimum age (thirty compared to twenty-five in the House); and their functions were seen as requiring greater discretion and discernment (for example, ratification of treatises and advising and approving the executive's judicial nominees).
But even during the summer of 1787, the aristocratic nature of the Senate had shifted to something more practical. Owing to the "great compromise," the Senate was created in order to represent the states as political units, with each state receiving equal political representation (two senators per state) much as in the House, each person received equal political representation. Thus, from the ratification of the Constitution until 1913, senators were elected by their state legislators rather than by the citizens of the state. In 1913, the Seventeenth Amendment was ratified after which individual voters were able to directly elect their U.S. senators.
Executive, Judicial, and Interest Group Representation
The executive and judicial branches must also be considered locations of political representation in the United States. In the executive branch, the nation as a whole is thought to be represented, and the symbols of that branch—the White House and the president—are regularly held to be symbols of the country. In the case of the judiciary as it has developed from its founding, the Constitution or supreme law of the land finds its representation.
Finally, the rights granted in the Bill of Rights, particularly the rights of free expression and congregation, have allowed citizens to form groups around various interests and to organize to persuade their elected representatives on issues that matter to them. The appropriateness of such "lobbying" activities—including giving money to political campaigns—has been debated throughout American history. In any case, there is little doubt that interest group lobbying remains a distinctive and important hallmark of political representation in the United States.
Bibliography
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Keyssar, Alexander. The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States. New York: Basic Books, 2000.
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