Last week the Massachusetts Senate voted down a proposal to appoint an independent commission to oversee the Congressional redistricting that must take place as a result of last year’s census. Massachusetts loses one seat, meaning that either one of the 10 congressmen will retire, challenge Senator Scott Brown or two of them will face off in a primary battle. For what it’s worth, my money is on the first and second districts being merged to take up all of western Massachusetts.

Of course, the really interesting thing about redistricting is that Massachusetts’ population didn’t decline over the last decade. Only Michigan lost residents between 2000 and 2010, and most states saw modest growth, although Texas and California increased the most. Congress uses a mathematical formula called the method of equal proportions to determine apportionment in order to make sure that every Congressional district has a roughly equal population. You take the population of all the states and divide it by the number of representatives to get the average district size. Then you give each state the one representative it’s entitled to under the Constitution and then you divvy up the rest based on the average. There’s nothing wrong with this method of apportionment.

Unfortunately, there’s one number that has remained constant for 100 years: the number of representatives. In 1911, Public Law 62-5 raised the total membership of the House to 433, with provisions to increase to 435 when New Mexico and Arizona joined the Union the following year. There have been 435 members of the House of Representatives ever since, with the exception of 1959-1963, when there were two extras after Alaska and Hawaii were admitted. What this means is that the average district size keeps going up and up, from a little over 30,000 people per district to a little over 700,000 people per district by the 2010 census.

That’s not democracy; that’s oligarchy. As the same number of people represent more and more, democracy breaks down. Consider Massachusetts. There are a lot of divisions along class, geographic and racial/ethnic lines. Each grouping is a political constituency – people who live in Springfield have different concerns than people who live in Hadley, and both have different concerns than people who live in Amherst. When districts are small, the Hadley, Amherst and Springfield people all get a say in government. While Springfield and Amherst have more votes than Hadley, Hadley’s voice is still there, calling the big guys’ attention to issues that are important, but that they don’t always notice. On the other hand, when Amherst, Hadley and Springfield all belong to the same district, Springfield’s voice dominates due to its larger population.

But it’s not just the dominance of major urban areas over less urban and rural areas that result in oligarchy. There is also the problem of incumbency. Congress has the lowest approval rating of any American institution. Even multinational corporations that are blamed for everything from pollution to the economic crisis to mass unemployment are viewed in a better light than Congress. But it’s almost impossible for incumbents to lose reelection. That’s why the elections of 1980, 1994 and 2010 are sometimes referred to as “revolutions” – because a lot of incumbents lost. Part of the paradox is that we view other people’s representatives with contempt, but prefer our own. And part of it because of large congressional districts.

Think about it. If the majority of people in Springfield prefer Candidate A, but the majority of people in the hill towns prefer Candidate B, then Candidate A will most likely win and stick around for a long time. Three Congressmen from Michigan, John Dingell, John Conyers and Dale Kildee, were born in the 1920s and most representatives are baby boomers (for that matter, most elected officials period are baby boomers). So we have ended up with a government composed largely of people born during the Truman administration, who grew up with “Duck and Cover” as a strategy to avoid being nuked. They grew up with the threat of nuclear war, and they remember where they were when they heard about JFK, MLK and RFK. They saw Neil Armstrong walk on the moon, watched Elvis on TV, listened to The Beatles on the radio. Now, they have moments where they wonder about Guam capsizing, think that the Internet is a series of tubes and dump trucks, and occasionally forget what century it is. Thanks to the dual advantages of incumbency and large districts we young people – the future of America – can enjoy being governed by its distant past.

It is true that if young Americans voted more we would at least force politicians to pay attention to us, but I also think it’s true that if legislative districts were more numerous and contained fewer people, more people would vote. If congressional districts today were the size they were in 1790, we’d have much closer relationships with our representatives, because they would be our neighbors. They would probably also reflect a greater demographic cross-section by economic class, race and gender, and they could stay in-touch with their districts by being there instead of requiring pollsters and lobbyists to get them constituent information.

It’s the difference between going to Amherst Books versus Barnes & Noble, the difference between democracy and oligarchy and the difference between a government of the people and a government that rules the people.

Matt Robare is a Collegian columnist. He can be reached at [email protected].