LEGISLATIVE APPORTIONMENT

also called legislative delimitation process by which representation is distributed among the constituencies of a representative assembly. The use of the term apportionment is limited almost exclusively to the United States. In most other countries, particularly the United Kingdom and the countries of the Commonwealth, the term used is delimitation. Apportionment can take relatively simple forms: in the assembly of ancient Athens, for example, each citizen represented himself. During later centuries, in the East as well as the West, the courts and councils of kings and emperors were formed of representatives of several classes, such as the nobility, clergy, and delegates of such bodies as guilds and centres of learning. With the growth of democracy, the extension of suffrage, and the rise of political parties, however, legislative apportionment became a complex problem. Apportionment had to be methodically and mathematically arranged to ensure that the distribution of legislative seats would reflect most accurately the will of the electorate. Although practice varies widely, it is possible to distinguish five general types of legislative apportionment, each giving rise to a particular form of constituency: 1. Territorial apportionment: constituencies have specified boundaries, and ideally the number of voters in each of the constituencies is about equal; this is the most common form of apportionment. 2. Apportionment among self-contained governing units (such as towns, counties, cities, states, etc.): the unit of local government acts as the constituency and is represented in higher legislative bodies. 3. Apportionment among official bodies that act as constituencies: local or provincial bodies choose representatives (e.g., the state legislatures chose U.S. senators before the 17th Amendment established popular election). 4. Apportionment among functional groupings of the population: the electorate is grouped according to social or economic characteristics, resulting in such divisions as the nobility, clergy, and commoners of early English Parliaments or the occupational, industrial, professional, national, and other groupings used as the basis for apportionment in guild socialism. 5. Apportionment among party interests: systems of proportional representation are designed to reflect as many facets of voter opinion as possible (see proportional representation). Under the latter two systems, the group or party is regarded as the constituency. Disparity of constituency sizes has been a recurring problem in legislative apportionment everywhere. Electoral reforms have often been instituted to eliminate such malapportionments as the system of rotten boroughs (see rotten borough) in Britain and the practice of gerrymandering (q.v.) in the United States. Periodic reapportionments by constituency boundary commissions have been adopted by legislatures in order to adjust apportionment to changes in population. The authority to adjust apportionment can be an important tool in maintaining the power of the incumbent party. Constituencies can be defined, for example, in a way that concentrates the power of the opposition into relatively few districts, while giving the ruling party narrow majorities in a large number of districts, thus giving the incumbent party a disproportionately large share of seats. Or, by a different strategy, individual incumbents may influence the apportionment to give themselves districts with no substantial opposition. While such politically motivated apportionment is generally regarded as an abuse, various minority groups in the United States have recently begun to call for what amounts to gerrymandering to preserve the integrity and power of special-interest blocs of voters in large cities.