Congress

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1. notafraudsterJun 2020
   My background is academic and so I worry that any recommendations I give will suffer from reflecting that. It's way easier for me to say "spend ten years of your life living and breathing this stuff, it'll clear up your thoughts nicely!" than it is to point to a YouTube channel. CGP Grey sometimes does very 101 level topics on electoral systems, but very little on what I'd call the political science of representation or US-specific institutions.

   My advice, if you want to get a sense for the academic lay of the land is to try an Intro to US Politics course at any college that is well ranked, and to follow currently active professors from research universities on Twitter. Often by reading today's journal articles, you a) get a sense for new findings, and b) get a sense for whose shoulders they stand on, and where they come from. And academics do a shitty job of sharing these ideas with the public. I do read Andrew Gelman's blog, but he's a social science statistician and so mostly he's working on quant methods and not substantively interesting questions.

   The main journals in US politics are: American Journal of Political Science, American Political Science Review, Journal of Politics.

   I checked the syllabus of my first graduate level American Politics class from, err, a fair few years ago now. Here are some of the canonical books I'd recommend that speak to the kinds of questions I study:

   - Anthony Downs: An Economic Theory of Democracy - John Zaller: Nature and Origins of Public Opinion - David Mayhew: Congress The Electoral Connection - Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal: Ideology and Congress - Keith Krehbiel: Information and Legislative Organization - Mathew McCubbins and Gary Cox: Setting the Agenda (or their other book, Legislative Leviathan, both great)

   These speak to some of the biggest theoretical and measurement considerations in American Politics and Representation. All of them should be readable without prior college experience. I will note that I just offered you like 5,000 pages of book that will probably take a year to get through.

   Hope some of this provides a useful jumping off point.

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2. aaron-leboApr 2020
   The tax code is complex to a large degree due to the political process.

   See Mayhew's Congress: The Electoral Connection, or literature on path dependency.

   https://www.amazon.com/Congress-Electoral-Connection-David-M...

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3. aaron-leboFeb 2017
   You are correct. This is politics 101 as put forward by David Mayhew.

   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congress:_The_Electoral_Connec...

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4. aaron-leboSep 2016
   > Can you imagine a House of Representatives with 9400 members? How would business get done? Well, maybe that's the point. There would be so many representatives, that votes would have to be made based on what the person feels is right for their 30,000 voters, rather than how much money they can collect from lobbyist for their next campaign. 9400 Representatives would make it a lot harder for lobbyist to sway the will of our elected officials. It would make pork barrel projects almost nonexistent because districts would be too small to gather enough support for the most silly of funding requests. It's a lot harder to buy off 9400 people than it is 435. Particularly if each of those 9400 people have to go back to talk directly to just 30,000 people several times a year. Representatives' support would really have to come from the local grassroots level. They might even vote per their constituents desires! Imagine that!

   This seems like common sense, but there are a number of things in the social sciences that don't work out as common sense would.

   Voting is, after all, largely irrational.

   The other possibility is that corruption would be reduced in scope as to make it difficult to detect and and root out. Do you know 10 of the 435 representatives? The average person doesn't. Have you seen a corrupt city council? Now imagine every 9400 of those people representing 30k and imagine the possibilities for corruption.

   > The one problem with a number of Representatives being so large is that bill introduction may become a bit unmanageable. If we keep to the current system of making huge bills with tons and tons of legal code, things would be unmanageable. However, that doesn't necessarily need to be a roadblock. Maybe we shouldn't keep the current system of bill introduction! Maybe our Representatives should really just submit succinct laws that apply to very specific things. We would still need a huge bill from time to time to address social and other national issues, and the national budget, but we would pretty much end riders that plague the current system. We can even use 21st Century technology to make such bills easier to process. (Anyone hear of this Wonder called The Internet?)

   Ok, so now the author is suggesting not just reforming law but reforming voting behavior. Good luck? What the author seems to be complaining about is an individual's access to their representative. This is fair, but reducing the number of constituents in no way guarantee that. The same dynamics discussed by Mayhew would still be in play. [1]

   Access can be increased via modern technologies, but that's a seprate argument.

   1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congress:_The_Electoral_Connec...

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5. ClananAug 2013
   The Executive Branch enforces, the Judicial judges. The Constitution says it quite explicitly in Articles 2 and 3.

   You give far too much credit to politicians. They don't think of this as security vs. freedom, they think of it as power. Power for them, power for their party, power for their people. It's a simple explanation, but it fits. Heck, research has even shown that politicians will decide based on what keeps them in office, not what they "should" do [1]. Jefferson said it best: "All men having power ought to be mistrusted. Perhaps it is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged to the provisions against danger, real or pretended, from abroad."

   [1] Congress: The Electoral Connection by David R. Mayhew

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