Abstract
In a recent issue of Polity, Charles and John Kromkowski argue for abandoning the apportionment process for determining state delegation sizes in the House of Representatives and returning to a system of marginal but decennial in the size of the chamber.1 According to their analysis, regularly increasing the size of the institution would yield a plethora of advantages ranging from more active citizen participation in government to decreased opposition to Puerto Rican statehood, and from restoring the Congress's federal foundations to ensuring more competitive legislative elections. While the Kromkowskis cogently explain the history of automatic apportionment and reopen the debate regarding its wisdom, they seriously misinterpret the likely impact of decennial size increases on the electoral fortunes of Members and on the internal workings of the institution. In this essay, I examine a number of their claims concerning the dynamics of an enlarged House and argue that they comport with neither common sense nor the weight of the academic literature on the subject.
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