Because of the long-running inversion of political power in America from the local level to the national level, these days we hear all about the decline of democracy in Washington, D.C. but very little about the decline of local democracy. This got me to thinking about representation where I live in Douglas County, Colorado.
Governance in Douglas County is overseen by three county commissioners. Because about 360,000 people live in Douglas County, that means we have one commissioner for every 120,000 people. Let's compare this degree of representation to what Americans experienced in the early years of the Republic. At the time of the 1790 census, the state with the closest population to present-day Douglas County was Massachusetts with 340,000 people. Yet consider that the lower house in Massachusetts had (I believe) 240 representatives! This works out to one representative for every 1400 people. Given Dunbar numbers, most citizens had a decent chance of being acquainted with their representative. By comparison, very few people in Douglas County know one of the commissioners - and those people are probably Republican party insiders, not ordinary citizens. These days we'd think it crazy to have a legislature of 250 representatives in someplace like Douglas County, but maybe that's because we've grown accustomed to such paltry degrees of representation.
Although I don't want to sound cynical, I must say that if we look at the situation not from the bottom up but from the top down then the decline in local democracy makes sense: if you're a "public-spirited" (or power-hungry) person who wants to "have an impact" (or feel important), you'd much prefer to "represent" (or dictate to) 120,000 people than 1400 people. Dispersed costs, concentrated benefits.
Speaking of local democracy, at our annual meeting a few weeks ago I was elected president of the civic association in my neighborhood of ~200 homes; although I don't know everyone in the neighborhood, it's something I could accomplish - unlike those county commissioners with 120,000 constituents. I'll certainly try to do a better job of representing the interests of the folks in my neighborhood than the commissioners do in our county.
To be clear, our civic association has no real power - it's not even a homeowners' association and thus can't enforce covenants or set architectural standards or anything like that. This is in contrast to, say, the townships in New England, where especially in olden days every year the citizens in their distinctive town meetings would debate and vote on taxes, roads, schools, and other matters of local importance. It was the example of New England townships that inspired Thomas Jefferson to declare the need to "divide the counties into wards" because he foresaw that with the growth in population even county governments would stray too far from the people. Boy, was he right!
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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