Member-only story
I was provoked by some twitter correspondence on the effectiveness of council scrutiny. It made me dig out this blog article, which was originally written as part of the debate over the failed 2013 boundary review. I list some papers, arguing that the UK’s parliament is too large, and too small, and that large parliaments tend to corruption, while small one’s struggle to hold an executive accountable. Later reading and thinking has led me to worry that the size of the losing constituency i.e. the number of voters can be a problem in gaining a losers consent; a problem exacerbated if the winners do not have a majority of the votes.
Do we have enough or do we have too many politicians? This is a quantity not quality issue. Here are my notes …
Paper 1. How strong is the case for reducing the number of MPs (consoc.org.uk), the authors, Lewis Baston and Stuart Wilks-Heeg, say,
“In this short paper, we pose three important questions in relation to the government’s own rationale for reducing the number of MPs. First, is the House of Commons is really ‘too big’? Second, is the number of MPs really growing, and without justification? Third, will reducing the number of MPs really save money?”
Paper 2. The More the Merrier? Choosing the optimal number of representatives in modern democracies by Auriol and Gary-Bobo. They say,
