He put the book to the "page 69 test" and came up with the following:
The Concept of Constituency questions our unthinking reliance on territorial electoral constituencies to structure political representation. For example, in the US citizens are represented in the legislature based on where they live. I argue that notThanks to Andrew for the input.only is this an antiquated institution, it regularly skews law and policy against the public good in service to local partial interests. As an alternative I argue we should assign citizens of large nations into random groups each of which would have a single representative. In the US, this would mean creating 435 electoral groups each of which looked like the nation they collectively represented. After a period of transition, the result would be a move towards moderate centrism and the promotion of the public good.
The book is divided into three parts that treat the conceptual, historical and normative feature of electoral constituencies. The first part is a comparative analytical treatment of the way that constituencies have been defined through history—whether by group rights, political party, territorially, and through self identification.
Page 69 is the first page of the second section, a historical account of how territorial constituencies came to be used in the United States.
"Why were modern representation institutions in England and America organized around territorial constituencies?… Before the modern institutions of representative government were formed, the basis of life was decidedly local small and static. Geographic and social mobility were not the norm—indeed there were significant impediments to each—and as such it was difficulty to attach strong sentiments to things not locally based. Even as late as the seventeenth century, communities sent delegates to English parliament because it was by local communities that individuals.”
From the moment the US government was founded, however, this local basis of representation vanished. After 1789 each Congressional district was over 10 times as large as colonial and state legislative districts. Territorial constituencies for national representation never represented local communities of interest.
The final third of the book takes up contemporary problems and will be of most interest to general readers. First I argue that the notion that “all politics is local” is a fiction. Politics happens to be local only because we’ve created massive incentives for national politicians to care about local issues because they elect groups that are territorially defined. If we defined districts by profession, all politics would be “vocational.”
Territorial districting has also lead to the indefensible practice of Gerrymandering in which representatives get to craft electoral districts to maximize their own prospects of reelections. Even when these are undertaken for purportedly noble reasons—to give minorities like African American a “voice”—they can only succeed by creating even “whiter” districts in which majority representatives have less incentives to listen to the concerns of blacks (no longer in their districts). What emerges is a “paradox of representation” (named after a book by David Lublin): legislatures with more black representatives produce “whiter” legislation because the representatives from those “whiter” districts have fewer incentives to listen to the louder minority voice within the legislature. The solution, I argue, is to design institutions that foster “voice without earplugs.”
Readers will find the alternative I propose in the last chapter of the book the most fun: to create randomized, permanent, national electoral districts. Moderation would be the only winning strategy for every candidate for office. There is a strong normative position I argue for in favor of centrism: we should design our political institutions to reflect general median views in the polity, and leave it to leadership of various sorts to help move underlying opinion in different ways.
Read an excerpt from The Concept of Constituency.
Among the praise for the book:
"Rehfeld presents a surprisingly powerful argument for breaking the power of gerrymandering.... [P]eople ought to be thinking about both his proposal and his arguments about constituency more generally in trying to understand what to do about the American gerrymandering mess."Previous "page 69 tests:"
--Jacob T. Levy
"In the current climate of complete and utter confusion, even despair, concerning the direction of redistricting practices, Rehfeld's project is important, laudable, and most welcome. His book is a much-needed attempt to develop a stock of concepts and a vocabulary sufficient to permit reasoned argument and justification in subdividing an electorate into constituencies, and he shows us both by argument and by example how to demand sound justifications for any use of territory as the basis for election districts... The book is written with exceptional clarity, engagingly advances a rich argument, and performs a valuable service by challenging us to pay careful attention to positions and arguments that, as Rehfeld persuasively shows, have not been subjected to adequate scrutiny."
--James A. Gardner, Election Law Journal
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