The House was supposed to grow with population. It didn’t. Let’s fix that
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
But as I think about it more, I'm coming around to the idea. Instead of voting in representatives that we are completely disconnected from, we would instead vote in representatives whom we have some form of personal connection with. 30,000 constituents is about the size of a medium-sized university. Whenever someone runs for office, you would most likely know someone who knows that person on a personal level. Someone who can either vouch for them, or tell you all their red flags. And as the author pointed out, candidates wouldn't need to worry about fundraising nearly as much, since they can rely on their personal network to campaign effectively.
In theory this should mean that the average representative would be smarter, more capable, and of better moral character. And a house comprised of smarter, more capable, and more morally upstanding representatives would function a lot better than what we have now.
The house would need to be fundamentally changed of course. The "office-oriented" culture would need to evolve into something that is more remote, decentralized, and distributed. And for starters, all voting would have to be done digitally. It would be a radical shift, but one that has real potential.
That's not what I would expect from theory. I'd expect it to make the representative more reflective of the intelligence, capability, and moral character of the constituents. If the constituents are deficient, they'll send deficient representatives.
I think you're suggesting that having representatives better known to the constituents would weed out misbehavior, but I believe it just means fewer eyes on them. If there are red flags, it only takes one person to notice, and can publicize it to all of the rest.
It's not that I'm opposed to expanding the House in this fashion. As HL Mencken said, "Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard." I believe that the problems we have stem from the voters themselves, not the mechanisms they use, and will not be fixed by any changes to those mechanics. Still, anything we do different is an opportunity to interrupt the vicious cycle of distrust that I think is the core problem.
Representation should not be based on population, but based on human capacity for remembering different people (cf. Dunbar's number).
350 Reps is no better than 1100 from that aspect. Can't know them all.
You’d only need to know those representing you, which would not change.
The purpose of the senate is to have a fixed knowable number of state representatives, while congress should allow for more fine-grain personal representation. The fixed number of congressmen diminishes the intended difference of the two houses.