Walrustitty for Leicester
February 8, 2012 7:15 PM   Subscribe

Why do Commonwealth countries and provinces name their parliamentary constituencies, and why do American state legislatures and Congress tend to number them?
posted by Hollywood Upstairs Medical College to Law & Government (24 answers total) 3 users marked this as a favorite
 
I would love to know the answer to this. I would note that last year, when California's redistricting commission released draft congressional maps, they didn't give the seats district numbers but rather used Canadian riding-style names, like "West San Fernando Valley - Calabasas" and "East San Gabriel Valley - Covina." Certainly a mouthful, but some people I know liked them better than numbers because they give you an actual sense of where a district is located.

When the final maps were released, though, the commission went back to using actual numbers. (I think the commission did this because they wanted to avoid any appearance that they were taking incumbency into consideration, so as to make it harder for people to say "Modoc - Tehama? That's obviously Wally Herger's seat!" Not that it really made a difference.) So in the end, just a temporary blip to the usual American way of doing things.
posted by Conrad Cornelius o'Donald o'Dell at 7:22 PM on February 8, 2012


In the US, congressional districts are redrawn every 10 years based on population changes. And don't necessarily follow any other boundaries like counties or towns. So naming them would just cause trouble, as the Peoria district could turn into the Springfield district with the wrong name.
posted by gjc at 7:23 PM on February 8, 2012 [1 favorite]


I am sure that part of this has to do with our love affair with gerrymandering. The reason we don't give geographical names to constituencies is because often there is no coherent geographical name for the shape of the district (i.e. the east half of Westvale and a two-block-wide corridor down Lala Avenue for a mile and then the west quarter of Bluefield Valley). Numbers make it easier.
posted by elizeh at 7:26 PM on February 8, 2012


Also, as gjc says, districts can change or disappear with every census.
posted by elizeh at 7:27 PM on February 8, 2012


I'd imagine (as do commenters on the StraightDope forum) that it's partly because decennial redistricting can completely redraw a state's electoral map in a way that generally doesn't happen in the UK/Aus/Can/etc., and partly because federal districts in the US (and even some state ones) are sufficiently large and sprawling and gerrymandered that it's hard to find names that are fully encompassing and representative of the area covered.
posted by holgate at 7:27 PM on February 8, 2012


The reason we don't give geographical names to constituencies is because often there is no coherent geographical name for the shape of the district

...and the coherence that determines district boundaries doesn't really lend itself to naming: "Well Bob, enough results are in, so we're calling 'All Those White Subdivisions' for Suburban White Guy!"
posted by holgate at 7:33 PM on February 8, 2012 [1 favorite]


I feel like some unwarranted assumptions are being made here.

Australia also adjusts electoral boundaries fairly regularly (with a legislated maximum of 7 years between redistributions, according to wikipedia). Also, our electorates are named after people, not places.

That said, I suspect there is no particular answer apart from 'because that's the way it worked out'.
posted by pompomtom at 7:33 PM on February 8, 2012 [1 favorite]


On second thoughts: Australia does have an independent electoral commission, which I gather the US lacks. Perhaps using numbers is simply a way to avoid more inter-party bickering in the US?
posted by pompomtom at 7:35 PM on February 8, 2012


Australia also adjusts electoral boundaries fairly regularly

But not to the same degree.

our electorates are named after people, not places.

People and places. The original electoral divisions were named after places, and redistribution brought in a lot of the people-name divisions, often where they spanned multiple suburbs or rural towns, or didn't map cleanly to them. But I think you have a point about numbering as a way to avoid bickering: were California to name its districts after famous Californians, I'm sure it'd cause a kerfuffle.
posted by holgate at 7:55 PM on February 8, 2012 [1 favorite]


Well, in the UK, my limited understanding is that constituencies originally were geographic areas that were entitled to send someone to the Commons. So if the town of Foo is entitled to send a member, it makes sense to call that constituency Foo, dunnit? This changed later as pressure to get rid of rotten boroughs and sort-of equalize populations, but presumably the names or practice of naming stuck.

I'm not aware of any such tradition in the postcolonial US. There's no origin in a nameable area that's entitled to send someone to the legislature, just... districts. Drawn as needed, changeable to the core, just an administrative tool. NOT something reflecting a constitutive right to send someone to the legislature. So why not just number them?

As to other commonwealth countries, I can't see anything surprising in maintaining a tradition from the mother country.

Nit: numbering isn't universal in the US. Massachusetts uses both numbering and names for its legislative districts, and New Hampshire House districts are named.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 8:21 PM on February 8, 2012


I don't know how many commonwealth systems do this, but the U.K. has added members of parliament when constituencies got larger (as has Canada); the U.S. does not. The "average" member of the House of Representatives represents 700,000 people; the "average" member of the British Parliament represents 100,000. So as the population grows in Westminster systems, more representatives can be added to represent actual geographic areas; as the population grows in the U.S., the same 435 members must be shifted around.

In fact to use gjc's example of Peoria, the new Illinois Congressional map splits Peoria in two, putting (the poorer) half in a district with Rockford and (half of) the Quad Cities that Democrats hope will take a seat back from the Republican currently serving there; the other (wealthier) half is in with a largely rural district with a popular GOP representative that's likely to remain Republican. You can see (on the other side of the 18th district) all the bump-ins to put Springfield, Bloomington, and Champaign in one (likely Democratic) district. Not that grouping urban areas together and rural areas together is necessarily a bad thing -- shared interests and all -- but you get the idea. And this map is way LESS gerrymandered than the last one.

Anyway, a lot of these districts are so BIG it's not clear what you'd call them -- Rockford-Galesburg-South Peoria? -- and then they redistribute every 10 years but not in particular accordance with "natural" boundaries because you've got the same* number of seats (in this case 18) for a shifting, growing population. The current Illinois 17th (which will cease to exist next election) is 8,289 square miles with a population of 628,820 people, which makes it roughly the size of the nation of Israel or El Salvador, with twice the population of Iceland. Big.



(*or one more or one less)

posted by Eyebrows McGee at 8:27 PM on February 8, 2012


To get a rough idea of what regional communities in Illinois look like, you could compare that Illinois Congressional map above with this broadcast market map. Many of the small markets on the edges are communities tied to a neighboring state's broadcast market and their politics and problems may be much more tied up in the neighboring state's issues. So even state boundaries are not necessarily "natural" boundaries between communities.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 8:31 PM on February 8, 2012


I think a good answer to this question will look at when numbering was first used in the US, as it seems that names seem to be the default in English tradition. My limited understanding is that placenames were used during colonial times, but switched to numbering with the republic. If true, it may be a very conscious choice that reflected a change in needs or views at that time, and arguing from problems associated with modern times is fruitless.
posted by Jehan at 9:06 PM on February 8, 2012


Well, in Canada, it used to be a riding was as far as you could travel on a horse in a day or something like that. So I think people tended to refer to the community by name. But we redraw boundaries all the time and maybe it's just a Commonwealth convention.
posted by Chaussette and the Pussy Cats at 9:07 PM on February 8, 2012


Well, in Canada, it used to be a riding was as far as you could travel on a horse in a day or something like that. So I think people tended to refer to the community by name. But we redraw boundaries all the time and maybe it's just a Commonwealth convention.

No, that's not the etymology of the word "riding", and there's no reason why they should not be much greater or smaller than "natural" communities.
posted by Jehan at 9:16 PM on February 8, 2012


I'm not aware of any such tradition in the postcolonial US.

In fact, for the first House elections, more states had "at-large" elections for multiple seats than districted ones, and the states with districts went through a fair bit of experimentation: Massachusetts went from single-member districts to multi-member districts with an at-large seat and back again in the space of four years. However, some districted states used existing boundaries (South Carolina used its "overarching districts") until the first census in 1790 and the resulting apportionment of seats.
posted by holgate at 9:26 PM on February 8, 2012


Elections Canada is uncertain about the etymology and acknowledges that there is a question of whether a riding relates to how far a horse travels. Perhaps this was a convention in Canada, not elsewhere, at one time, since Elections Canada seems uncertain as to whether that's how it started out here.
posted by Chaussette and the Pussy Cats at 11:10 PM on February 8, 2012


I'd suggest the American electoral system might take inspiration from the French system of boundaries. In France, municipal arrondisements and arrondisements of the départements were numbered from long before the Revolutionary period.
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 1:33 AM on February 9, 2012


(Although the départements themselves, like county and city regions in the US, are named, not numbered).
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 1:35 AM on February 9, 2012


I think perhaps it is related to the naming conventions of USians vs Comonwealthians.

I have noticed that USians tend to like acronyms and numbers, like, SOPA, COPA, PIPA, POTUS and the like. Comonwealthians tend to go with full names of things (FICA vs National Insurance), (101st Airborne vs Royal Greenjackets).

I have no explanation for this, and it is possibly a bit of a derail, but it feels kinda related to me.

As an aside, I was always very amused by the technical naming of space shuttle parts. THe SSMRB, Space Shuttle Main Rocket Booster is fair enough, but the SSRW and SSLW (Space Shuttle Right Wing and Space Shuttle Left Wing) are a little bit silly.
posted by Just this guy, y'know at 2:07 AM on February 9, 2012


Guy, two nations divided by a common laguage ... actually lots of nations lol.

Sometimes these things start out small, get picked up and used more widely, and before long it is a case of 'well, we always do it that way, but I don't know why'.
posted by GeeEmm at 2:45 AM on February 9, 2012


So as the population grows in Westminster systems, more representatives can be added to represent actual geographic areas; as the population grows in the U.S., the same 435 members must be shifted around.

Kind of, but they don't all have the same number of constituents and Cameron is trying to get the number of MPs reduced at the moment, though his MPs aren't all very keen as it will mean some losing a job.
posted by biffa at 6:44 AM on February 9, 2012


I'm not certain the redrawing electoral boundaries really necessitates numbering. I guess it might lower expectations that districts would be cohesive communities, somewhat, but most here (in Canada) don't see their district or riding as their primary community. For example, provincially, I'm shifting from "Edmonton Mill Creek" to "Edmonton Gold Bar" this election and either geographical name seems natural enough. The new district combines more similar neighbourhoods than that old one. (Mill Creek was astonishingly far flung for an urban provincial district combining establish neighbourhoods with suburbs as well as a bizarre chunk of rural Strathcona county and most in the provincial NDP considered it gerrymandered against them after a close result back in the 90s.)

When I look at the way the federal ridings are drawn in Saskatchewan I find an almost offensive gerrymandering: the major cities are divided into quarters so that every urban riding has a large rural rump attached, and no "Centre" riding like we see in almost any city of any size in other provinces. The Centre ridings, including downtowns, are almost invariably more left-leaning than the rural area and form a singular conhesive community. I think it's not by accident that Canada's traditional home of social democracy hasn't elected a lefty politician since 2000.

Sometimes, the very large amalgamated riding names have a wonderful poetry about them. I was actually a bit disappointed some years ago when a lot of the riding names were shortened. Bonaventure—Gaspé—Îles-de-la-Madeleine—Pabok rattled out of the francophone mouth in a beautiful, melodic fashion in a way that Gaspésie—Îles-de-la-Madeleine can only approach from a distance. I'd be in favour of renaming my federal district to something like, Edmonton -- Strathcona -- Mill Creek -- University -- Whyte just because it would give a better flavour of the culture of the area.
posted by Kurichina at 8:24 AM on February 9, 2012


as the population grows in the U.S., the same 435 members must be shifted around.

No. There is no constitutional limit to the size of Congress and over the course of the C19th it was steadily expanded. The 435 number was reached in 1913 and for some reason we've stuck there--but there's no reason it shouldn't be expanded (and good reason, I would argue, to expand it).

In any case, redrawing of district boundaries is just as common, just as political and just as subject to the vagaries of time in non-USian democracies as it is in the US. This would appear to be just "one of those things" rather than being rooted in any practical difference in the political process.
posted by yoink at 2:35 PM on February 9, 2012


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