Demography, Delimitation, and Democracy

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In August 2022, I gave a talk titled “Demography, Delimitation, and Democracy,” about the impact of freezing the electoral constituency sizes India based on population numbers from the 1971 census. The Indian population has grown, and its internal demographics have changed significantly in the last half-century, which has led to malapportionment, which is the asymmetry between the shares of electoral constituencies relative to the shares of the population for given geographical units (usually states).Malapportionment is quite severe in India. At the extremes: In Bihar, one Member of Parliament (MP) represents approximately 3.1 million citizens. An Uttar Pradesh MP represents approximately 2.96 million citizens. A Tamil Nadu MP represents approximately 1.97 million citizens. And a Kerala MP represents approximately 1.75 million citizens. Consequently, India is no longer living up to its fundamental constitutional principle of “one person, one vote.”My friend Amit Varma asked me to discuss how India ended up at this point on his excellent The Seen and the Unseen podcast. On the episode (#336), we discussed the problem of delimitation frozen to 1971 census numbers, the design problem with Indian bicameralism and India’s fiscal centripetalism. Since I am currently working on two papers on the topic, I thought I would add some of the data visualizations from my talk last year in a Substack post to supplement Amit’s podcast show notes.ShareConstitutional DesignDelimitation refers to the action of fixing the boundary or limits of something. In Indian politics, it means determining…