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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. You're frustrated about gridlock and democracy in Congress these days, right? How many days do we talk about that on this show? The Senate is permanently stuck because of the filibuster and Joe Manchin and the fact that small conservative states get the same two senators as New York and California.

In fact, the Brookings Institution says California alone-- Listen to this stat. California alone has the same population as the 21 smallest states combined, but California gets two senators. Those smaller states get 42. Congress needs reform, right? Well, yes. My first guest today is one of the country's leading thinkers on democracy and she has a Washington Post op-ed that proposes one way to reform Congress, but here's the surprise.

It's not about changing the Senate. It's about changing the House. Danielle Allen is a professor of political philosophy, ethics, and public policy at Harvard. She is former chair of the Mellon Foundation and the Pulitzer Prize Board, the author of books, including Democracy in the Time of Coronavirus, and a Washington Post columnist where her latest piece is called The House was Supposed to Grow with Population. It Didn't. Let's Fix That.

I'll say that again. The House was Supposed to Grow with Population. It Didn't. Let's Fix That. It's part of a series in which she's exploring ways to stop our country from pulling apart with ways to come together. I'm so glad we have Danielle Allen on the show for the first time now with her important work. Professor Allen, thanks so much for coming on with us. Welcome to WNYC.

Professor Danielle Allen: Thank you so much, Brian. Glad to be here with you.

Brian Lehrer: The House of Representatives. When the country was founded, you remind us, each House district had around 34,000 people. How many are in each House district today?

Professor Danielle Allen: Well, we're up to about 762,000 people per district.

Brian Lehrer: Wow.

Professor Danielle Allen: Really phenomenal change.

Brian Lehrer: The number of House members used to grow with the size of the national population. When and why did that stop?

Professor Danielle Allen: That's right. Every 10 years with a new census, the House would be reapportioned and there would be an increase in the number of members of the House. That stopped in 1929. There was an act at that time, the Permanent Apportionment Act. There had been a lot of debate about challenges. People were worried about the size of the building.

They were worried about just, "Can you still do business with more representatives?" A lot of different issues, questions of geographical allocations, and the like. That act in 1929 set up a process where there's a de facto expected number of 435. The Census Bureau has a job of after we take the census, they just go back and say, "Okay. Well, now, here's how we'll allocate 435." Technically, Congress could change that number, but it hasn't done so for a century. For a century, our Congress has been capped at this 435 level.

Brian Lehrer: The question is, why does this matter to democracy and why does this matter to how the country is pulling apart?

Professor Danielle Allen: It's really a deep, deep question. I'm so glad you've made space for this conversation too, I want to say, Brian. Thank you as well for acknowledging how frustrated we all are with Congress. That's just true. We hear that everywhere. Congress is the first branch. At the end of the day, the House of Representatives is the body that is supposed to be closest to the people. There are a couple of critical design principles that the drafters of the Constitution used.

One was to meld popular sovereignty, which the House represented with a certain commitment to stability, which the Senate represented, but the House was also supposed to be elastic and dynamic change and shift with the population. When California grows, when Texas and Florida grow, they should get more representation. That hasn't happened for the last century. As a result, again, representatives are too far from their constituents. That reduces their responsiveness.

It also means there's a sort of information vacuum. There is not enough local connection to representatives. People take in their political news from national sources that really feels and feeds in the spiral of misinformation that can affect elections. If we can bring our representatives back closer to the people, we can address that responsiveness question. We can address that proximity to the people, start to fill in some of those information vacuums as well, and clean up the information ecosystem.

Brian Lehrer: I don't see where you've written a similar article on the Senate, maybe just not yet, but why would expanding the House do more to make our democracy more representative than reforming or even abolishing the Senate with that huge overweight it gives to small conservative rural states that we more often talk about?

Professor Danielle Allen: Well, it's really important to remember that when you're trying to build a system of free self-government, it should be based on a concept of popular sovereignty, principles of more majority elections, and the like, but you do also need minority-protecting mechanisms of all kinds, right? We definitely talk about minority-protecting mechanisms with regard to, for instance, African Americans and the right to vote, but it's not crazy to have minority-protecting mechanisms for rural communities as well.

In fact, that was the glue that held the whole thing together, was that there was a blend of majoritarian principles and minority-protecting principles. The problem we have is that the blend has gotten way out of whack, way too much emphasis on the minority-protecting mechanisms, and we need to rebalance. Growing Congress is one part of rebalancing. Here's a piece of the good news. When you grow Congress, you're also rebalancing the electoral college. The number of people who are in the House and Senate combined flows through to the number of electors. When we grow the House, you actually end up with an electoral college that's not out of whack in the way that it currently is.

Brian Lehrer: I was just going to ask about the electoral college implications, but, again, the way we usually talk about that is that the number of electors from each state since it's the number of senators plus the number of House members, that's how you get to 538. The number of senators plus the number of House members. It's those two senators from tiny states that we usually say disconnect the electoral college from the popular vote. You're saying having more House seats in the electoral college would also make it more democratic?

Professor Danielle Allen: That's exactly right, Brian. No, you've got it. The thing is, what's happening right now is that the House is, over time, becoming like the Senate, okay? [chuckles] We certainly don't need two senates. I won't tackle a Senate question right now, but I can tell you for sure, we only need one Senate. If we're going to have one Senate-

Brian Lehrer: At most.

Professor Danielle Allen: -then we definitely need a House that is growing with the population and making those adjustments in relationship to demography.

Brian Lehrer: One of your other recent columns on our national pulling apart is about social media resulting in so much contact between people. You actually say the founders of the country saw one part of a successful democracy successfully getting along as coming through the distance people had from each other. Can you explain that?

Professor Danielle Allen: Sure. It's a little counterintuitive. Right now, we really feel that we're in this incredibly polarized time and we are, even with parts of our society being not just polarized but radicalized. It's a really hot and fraught political time. Now, this was true as well at the time of drafting of the Constitution. They had all kinds of problems with factionalism as they called it. Congress was dysfunctional.

They couldn't get a quorum. They couldn't deal with the budget, with the debt issues, and the like. Those kinds of problems motivated them in drafting the Constitution. They thought the Constitution, its design, was a solution to that problem of faction. James Madison is the person who articulated the solution best. He did it in one of his essays that he published defending the Constitution. They're called The Federalist Papers.

In Federalist No. 10, the 10th essay, he explains how the mechanism was supposed to solve the problem of faction. It has two parts to the solution. We tend to focus on the first part. The first idea was that if it's a representative democracy, you'll elect people who will filter opinion and synthesize opinion and give us a moderated, synthesizing, steering direction for the polity. There was a second part to the solution and this is what you're asking about.

The second part was it would be a broad republic. It would be geographically broad. Dispersed people would be spread out. The result would be that people with extreme views, the only way they would be able to get them into the public sphere would be through representatives. The very breadth of the country would make it hard for the worst kinds of factions to form because people with extreme views wouldn't find each other and be able to coordinate.

Now, that is obviously no longer the circumstance that operates for us. People can easily find each other. Social media has taken that principle of geographic dispersal out from underneath us. We do really have to rethink the question of how can representation function so that we can actually make sure that extreme views are not co-opting or capturing the process that we do have basic filters in place and so forth.

Brian Lehrer: Interesting. If you're just joining us, my guest is Danielle Allen, thinker about democracy at Harvard and a Washington Post columnist. She's got a column proposing that one of the solutions to the country pulling apart is to expand the House of Representatives. When the country was founded, there were only 34,000 people per House district. Now, there are over 700,000 per House district.

Danielle, I could make a case that more and smaller House districts add fuel to the pulling apart because each district would have an even narrower specific population interest than it does now, that it's the statewide elections for Senate where the candidates actually have to build coalitions between city and suburban and rural voters. Senators tend to be more moderate than members of the House, or do you think that's wrong?

Professor Danielle Allen: Well, I do think that there are a number of different things that we actually need to do together at the same time. Growing the House is one really important reform that we need. I also think we need some changes to our electoral system. For example, I'm a real supporter for ranked-choice voting. I know New York has used that recently. People have direct experience of what ranked-choice voting is like. That is an electoral mechanism that requires people to build up support from more than 50% of voters, either it's their first choice or their second choice or their third choice.

That requires candidates to campaign in ways that are about building coalitions. It's not about dividing up the electorate and just trying to grab the biggest slice of what's been divided. Yes, we need to grow the House so that we can get representatives back closer to the people they represent, make sure they're more responsive to their constituents, more directly accountable to the people. I think we also need to change how they get elected so that their incentives pull in the direction of coalition building.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, interesting. One reason that you cite for having more House members, it's really interesting to me, is smaller districts would mean less expensive campaigns. Candidates would be less dependent on moneyed interest. Now, that's got to be good for democracy. You want to go into that a little bit?

Professor Danielle Allen: There you go. I started out by saying that there was a set of design principles that the people who drafted the Constitution used for thinking about its pieces and parts. I mentioned popular sovereignty and then the balance with the notion of stability that the Senate represented. Another critical design principle was what was called "due dependence on the people."

Are people duly dependent on ordinary voters? Are politicians duly dependent? The idea here is that you don't want your politicians captured by special interest, by rich donors, and the like. You want them to be responsible to and accountable to the broad electorate. Yes, to make the district smaller again and to make them easier to campaign in, reduce the cost, and so forth does change the impact of money in politics. Again, I don't think it's the only thing we should do about money in politics, but I do think it is very beneficial.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, although why wouldn't the special interest money, the really big special interest money, the really corrupting special interest money pour into competitive districts anyway that really big and corrupting set of special interests, maybe the fossil fuels lobby or the real estate lobby aren't short of money to spread around, are they?

Professor Danielle Allen: Well, it's certainly true that in any competitive race, if there's something that hangs really finely in the balance, you would see that pouring in. Again, as I said, I think that there are other reforms we also need around campaign finance. By the same token, if you've got more districts, then there are going to be fewer places in which those interests can play. That will give you more reluctant representatives who are truly dependent on the people, again, not on those big moneyed interests. That should enable more problem-solving, more flexibility in terms of coalitional dynamics, and things like that in the House.

Brian Lehrer: If we did expand the House of Representatives, would that benefit either party if we followed that blueprint? Because you know the way these things play out, things might be actually better for democracy on paper, but then they would benefit one party or the other in real life, at least at the moment, and so the other party objects. When we talk about making DC a state or Puerto Rico a state, there might be really good reasons for those things. The Republicans howl because those are Democratic areas. What about expanding the House?

Professor Danielle Allen: That's right. That is always one of the challenges with thinking about how we renovate our democracy, is where will we get stuck on the partisan politics of changing things? This reform is a really interesting one because modeling suggests that it is not clear which party it would benefit. It would not particularly benefit one or the other. It would add a kind of dynamism.

It would change up the basic equilibrium of our politics, but without actually handing favor to one side or the other. If you stop and think about it, it makes sense because the four biggest states in the country are California, New York, Texas, and Florida. If you just keep that in mind, it gives you a sense of the way in which the shifting and the adjustments that would come. With growing Congress, really, you'd see more representation in two blue states and two red states, for instance.

Brian Lehrer: Well, we're out of time, but I want to say that I think we've just scratched the surface of your interest in finding solutions to the pulling apart of our country. I'm really interested, for example, in one of your articles that we didn't get to touch on today, where you grapple with how we should all listen to the emotional truths of people politically different from ourselves, whoever we are. I think our listeners are deeply interested in this subject. I hope you'll come back and we can keep exploring more solutions. I think it's fantastic that you're devoting this year in your Washington Post column to the subject.

Professor Danielle Allen: Thanks so much, Brian. I'll be happy to join you anytime.

Brian Lehrer: Danielle Allen from Harvard and The Washington Post. Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Much more to come.

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