The U.S. Business firm of Representatives has one voting member for every 747,000 or then Americans. That's by far the highest population-to-representative ratio among a peer group of industrialized democracies, and the highest information technology'southward been in U.S. history. And with the size of the Firm capped by police force and the country's population continually growing, the representation ratio likely will only go bigger.

In the century-plus since the number of House seats first reached its current full of 435 (excluding nonvoting delegates), the representation ratio has more than tripled – from one representative for every 209,447 people in 1910 to 1 for every 747,184 every bit of terminal twelvemonth.

That ratio, listen you, is for the nation as a whole. The ratios for individual states vary considerably, mainly because of the House's fixed size and the Constitution's requirement that each state, no matter its population, have at to the lowest degree ane representative. Currently, Montana'due south 1,050,493 people have just one House member; Rhode Island has slightly more people (one,059,639), but that's enough to requite it two representatives – one for every 529,820 Rhode Islanders.

The U.Due south. findings in this post are based on Pew Research Middle analyses of House membership changes since 1789 and historical population data (actual when available, estimated when not). They exclude territories, the District of Columbia and other U.S. possessions that don't take voting representation in the Business firm. The analysis was complicated somewhat past the fact that new states often were admitted after a decennial demography just before the apportionment law based on that demography took effect (usually about three years afterward). In such cases, the new states were analyzed as if they had been states at the time of the census.

How the House reached 435

The first Congress (1789-91) had 65 Firm members, the number provided for in the Constitution until the first census could be held. Based on an estimated population for the 13 states of 3.seven million, there was 1 representative for every 57,169 people. (At the fourth dimension, Kentucky was part of Virginia, Maine was part of Massachusetts, and Tennessee was part of Due north Carolina. Vermont governed itself as an independent commonwealth, despite territorial claims by New York.)

By the fourth dimension the beginning apportionment pecker took issue in March 1793, Vermont and Kentucky already had joined the Wedlock; the 15 states had a full population of 3.89 one thousand thousand. Since the apportionment law provided for 105 House members, there was one representative for every 37,081 people. (According to the Constitution at the time, only three-fifths of the nation's 694,280 slaves were counted for apportionment purposes; using that method, the ratio was approximately one representative for every 34,436.)

For more than than a century thereafter, every bit the U.S. population grew and new states were admitted, the Business firm's membership grew too (except for 2 short-lived contractions in the mid-1800s). The expansion more often than not was managed in such a way that, fifty-fifty as the representation ratio steadily rose, states seldom lost seats from one apportionment to the next.

That process ran aground in the 1920s. The 1920 census revealed a "major and standing shift" of the U.Southward. population from rural to urban areas; when the time came to reapportion the House, every bit a Census Bureau summary puts it, rural representatives "worked to derail the process, fearful of losing political power to the cities." In fact, the House wasn't reapportioned until subsequently the 1930 census; the 1929 law authorizing that census also capped the size of the House at 435. And there it has remained, except for a brief catamenia from 1959 to 1963 when the bedroom temporarily added two members to represent the newly admitted states of Alaska and Hawaii.

There have been occasional proposals to add more than seats to the House to reflect population growth. 1 is the so-called "Wyoming Rule," which would make the population of the smallest country (currently Wyoming) the basis for the representation ratio. Depending on which variant of that dominion were adopted, the House would have had 545 to 547 members following the 2010 demography.

Notwithstanding, a recent Pew Research Center survey institute limited public support for calculation new Firm seats. Only 28% of Americans said the House should exist expanded, versus 51% who said it should remain at 435 members. When historical context was added to the question, support for expansion rose a flake, to 34%, with the additional support coming mainly from Democrats.

How the U.S. compares globally

The House's hefty representation ratio makes the Usa an outlier among its peers. Our research finds that the U.S. ratio is the highest amidst the 35 nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, most of them highly developed, democratic states.

We took the most contempo population gauge for each OECD nation and divided it by the current number of seats in the lower chamber of each national legislature (or, in the case of unicameral bodies, the single chamber). Later on the U.Southward., the ii countries with the highest representation ratios are Japan (one lawmaker for every 272,108 Japanese) and Mexico (ane for every 247,965 Mexicans). Iceland had the lowest ratio: one member of the Althing for every 5,500 or so Icelanders.

While much of the cross-national disparity in representation ratios can be explained past the large population of the U.Southward. (with more than than 325 million people it's the largest state in the OECD), that'south not the but reason. Eight OECD countries take larger lower chambers than the U.S. House, with Germany's Bundestag topping the league table with 709 members. The British House of Commons has 650 MPs (Members of Parliament); Italy'south Chamber of Deputies has 630 lawmakers.

Fifty-fifty if Congress decided to expand the size of the House, the large U.South. population puts some applied limits on how much the representation ratio could be lowered. If the House were to grow as big every bit the Bundestag, for instance, the ratio would fall only to ane representative per 458,428 people. In order to reduce the ratio to where it was after the 1930 census, the Firm would need to have 1,156 members. (That would still be smaller than China's National People's Congress, the largest national legislature in the world with 2,980 members.)