Political and Partisan Implications of State Legislative Apportionment

Abstract

The theme of the political and partisan implications of state legislative apportionment poses a challenge simultaneously with the sounding of a warning tocsin. The challenge lies chiefly in the need to view the forest of states as a whole in terms of their representative system; the warning lies in the necessity of considering individual state situations as significant in making up the forest without becoming appalled by the character and particularities of the separate trees. ]Reapportionment long since has become a chronic problem within the American states. Like all chronic situations it has been subjected to much critical analysis; like many such conditions the lack of ready, facile solutions has been bewailed or shrugged off as mood and time have seemed to dictate. It is not the task of this paper to chronicle the individual symptoms of this chronic malaise or disease; what is called for is a discussion of the social, economic, and political results and significances of a presumably epidemic condition. IConsequently the concern in this article will not be with the details of state representative systems, nor will there be any treatment of the merits or shortcomings of those individual legislative setups. Certainly it will be necessary to mention such detail in order to evaluate and assess specific representative devices. There will not however be the repetition of constitutional or statutory provisions so vital to an exposition of the apportionment process at the level of the American states. Trite and banal as it may seem, the process of the apportionment of the members of the American state legislatures has political and partisan implications simply because these positions are representative and are also elective. Under those circumstances it would seem to be inevitable that there would be political significance at all stages of the apportionment process. Approximately 7,500 individuals constitute the total membership of all American state legislative bodies. As has been detailed in an earlier section of this symposium, they have been distributed throughout the separate states in such a way that the 43 in the single chamber of Nebraska represent the minimum elected in any state; at the other end of the scale are the 433 in the two chambers of New Hampshire. All of these legislators, let it be repeated, are elective in terms of their acquisition of