Abstract
Decisions on the size of a parliament are genuinely political . Insofar it seems only logical that the few studies dealing with this topic from a political science perspective fail to provide unequivocal criteria that would allow politicians to pick just the “optimal” size of a parliament . Nevertheless, political science can provide some yardsticks that should enable informed decisions . According to studies on the size of parliaments and some empirical findings, the number of seats of North Rhine-Westphalia’s parliament is not to be reduced as demanded by the right-wing populist AfD . To downsize this state parliament would result in further deficits of democratic representation . In this respect, the AfD’s demand to reduce the size of state parliaments is not just a “standard issue of symbolic politics” (Werner J. Patzelt) . Rather, this claim reflects the party’s skeptical, if not even outright negative stance towards basic principles of representative democracy .
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