Representative Representation Research Paper

Superior Essays
Representation and its Purpose
Nicholas Mickulin nicholas.mickulin@gmail.com October 3rd, 2014.

The concept of a representative government was meant to be as representational as possible. The idea of a representative government is to filter the opinion of the masses by electing a small elite to run the country. This idea of government is actually contradictory because a representative government never represents everyone in the populace. In a representative government, representatives can only represent the majority that elected them. The representatives do not care about the minority in their district or state because the minority did not elect them. In reality, the majority is the only one being represented in that district or state, while
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It does not expand the number of representatives in total, but rather redistributes them to make them seem more representative of the population. The problem with this idea is that it only eliminates a lot of congressional districts and does not actually give more representation. It does not give more representatives to the same area, which is crucial if you want to maximize representation. Another problem with this idea is that it solves almost nothing. For example, a state with three congressional districts that has two republicans and one democrat in office combines all the districts into one super district. The republicans get 54% of the vote while the democrats get 46%. Under the fair voting system, the republicans would still have two seats and the democrats would still have one. Imagine states that have only one representative. They will not benefit from this plan because they already have a state wide election. Salam even admits to this in his article by saying, “fair representation voting won’t do much good in states that send only one member to Congress”. Low population states that only have one representative are the states that are least represented as a whole. An entire state has to choose one representative to represent them in the federal legislature. Something has to be …show more content…
The concept of a representative democracy is flawed and will continue to be flawed because someone’s opinion will be left out. This does not mean however, that representative democracy cannot work. Many countries, including the United States, have managed a representative government quite well. It is only now that people are talking about changing the system of representation because a state of gridlock is occurring. Both major political parties in the United States are refusing to work together to solve problems. This causes many individuals to rethink about how their system of government works. These individuals tend to complain more about how their government doesn’t represent their political party or their political ideas, rather than how their government does not represent enough of individuals of different

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