Apportionment and Majority Rule

Abstract

Almost immediately after the Supreme Court fired the first shot of the Reapportionment Revolution in 1962,1 counterattacks were undertaken by elements of both the political and scholarly communities.2 While the political community attempted to employ such tactics as limiting the appellate power of the court and amending the Constitution,3 the scholarly community lent ideological ammunition by attacking the Court's activism and decrying the threat to the federal system. The Court's allies, on the other hand, succeeded in frustrating the frontal political attack and countered the ideological attack by applauding the Court's courageous role and arguing that the changes were long overdue. Under these war-time conditions, it is little wonder that few scholars have attempted to understand systematically the implications of the Court's position for democratic theory, and even fewer have attempted to explicate the assumptions about democratic theory that the Court had made and to discern what sort of model of democracy the Court's decisions were based upon. Consequently, one of the major purposes of this paper is to make explicit the conceptions of democracy and representation that the Court assumes. But even beyond this, it will evaluate, according to the Court's own model of democracy, the extent to which the American representative system is democratic. In other words, the Court, throughout the reapportionment cases, has dealt with two