Legislature Structure and Procedure
Optimal legislature size, committees, and debate
This is part of my constitutional design series
This post is about the ins and outs of the legislature - what it looks like and how it turns the many different views of the legislators into concrete policies to pass. First, an intriguing question: how big should you make your legislature?
Optimal Legislature Size
The pros of a large legislature are similar to the pros of the legislature itself that I laid out in my post on the legislature:
When the legislature is bigger, there’s less randomness in the views of legislators due to larger sample size.
Random events like deaths are less impactful when the legislature is large.
These two points are more important than you’d think because the legislature is often closely divided.
You can partially get around this second point by allowing each legislator to appoint a “vice legislator” who takes over if they die, and maybe can take over temporarily if they get sick. This could be the legislator’s chief of staff. Or alternatively you can let the party of the legislator appoint a replacement.
You have more talent in the legislature when it is larger, and hopefully the most talented people in the legislature have outsized impact by introducing good bills or working their way up to party leadership.
You can represent the views of the public with more granularity when a legislature is larger; smaller groups are more likely to have proper representation in the legislature.
If you use proportional representation (which you should), you can always get rid of this granularity using a threshold, which you might want to do if you’d prefer small groups form coalitions instead of getting their own representative
It’s more expensive to bribe more people when the legislature is larger relative to the country’s GDP
The thing is, it’s also harder to bribe legislators when their public salary is higher. I’m not sure if it takes more money to bribe 100 legislators paid $100,000/year each or 10 legislators paid $1 million/year each.
The legislature can get more work done when there are more legislators
Though legislators can also just hire more staff in a larger legislature, so I’m not sure how big a deal this really is
The cons of a large legislature are:
When a legislature is larger, more of the power is held by party leadership; these are largely the people doing the serious negotiations. This can make things more polarized, because the views of party leadership are likely more polarized than a lot of the legislators
Whether this makes things more or less democratic is debatable: you could argue it makes it less democratic because most of the elected representatives are doing less of the work, or you could argue that it makes it more democratic because people’s votes are largely de facto votes for party leadership anyway
But I think this is unavoidable until you get to a really small legislature, like 20 people. Still, it’s probably more prevalent in larger legislatures.
On the flip side of the point above about talent, the average talent of a legislature is lower when the legislature is larger
This one is a bit confusing. I don’t think it should be hard to find a few hundred really talented people out of a country of 10 million+ people. But I think in practice you do see quite a few really inexperienced people in the legislature. I’m not sure how much this is dependent on legislature size though. It definitely depends more on how the party selects its candidates.
It’s physically more expensive to run a larger legislature.
As stated in the point about bribery, you might want to pay legislators in a small legislature more to prevent bribes, so the salary differences might not be huge, but there’s also costs of a larger building to accommodate more people, pay for travel, etc.
If you have districts, once the district gets too small public awareness about the legislators can get lower because there isn’t as much media coverage on them.
I think a legislature of size ~500 on the national level is probably optimal; that’s the typical size around the globe. I think the first point about randomness is really important: you get a majority of 5 if a coalition gets 51% of the vote, anything smaller than that is really just asking for trouble. All the other points in favor of large legislatures are a nice bonus.
When the population gets smaller, the cons of a large legislature start to become more apparent, so you want to lower the number. Once you get the whole legislature to be the size of a committee you should stop having committees altogether.
An alleged empirical observation is that the size of a legislature goes up proportionally to the cube root of the population. I’m a little skeptical of this observation, I mean look at the fit here, but I guess you can judge for yourself:
Is the cube root a good formula? IDK.
Procedure
The general procedure for passing a bill in almost all countries works like this:
A bill is introduced
(In some countries) there is a first round of voting on the bill itself and maybe on amendments among the whole legislature
It heads to a committee, where they vote on amendments and the bill itself.
It heads back to the legislature as a whole where they vote on amendments and final passage
For clarity I’ll use the American convention and call actions that take place among the whole legislature “floor” actions.
Leader Control
If you didn’t have a leader, how you would have a legislature function is make it so every bill that has majority support among the legislature passes. This is how I think legislation not subject to leader control should work, if you set out such categories of law. The policy that a legislature would agree to on these laws would be the Condorcet optimal policy (if one exists), the one that a majority of the legislature prefers to any other policy.
Once you have a leader though, that leader becomes the figure of accountability, so you want to give them power to control the agenda. As I described in my piece on the executive and the leader, there are two main ways of doing this:
Give them veto power that can be overridden by supermajority
Give them some number of votes in the legislature
You can implement these via “leader’s representatives”, people appointed by the leader to vote on their behalf who can be replaced at will.
I like veto power more on the national level. Whichever power you choose, I think you should make this power extend to all actions in the legislature, not just final passage. So if you have veto power, after a bill is introduced, the leader controls whether it goes to committee, then whether it gets back on the floor, then on every amendment before it passes. Each time, the legislature can override their veto only by supermajority.
The key step is that first one, when a bill is introduced. I want the legislature to work only on the bills that the leader wants them to work on, so the leader gets to set the agenda. I would even consider making the executive the only entity allowed to introduce bills in the legislature, which is the mostly the same in substance but different in appearance. The point of the rest of the steps is really to prevent the legislature from being hackish, amending the bill that the leader introduced to focus on something different.
Allowing the leader to veto amendments is also important for avoiding a bill simply reaching a “Condorcet final form”, and instead forcing it to look along the lines that the leader wants. If anyone can propose amendments and it takes just a majority to pass them, this gives all the leverage to the swing votes in the legislature. If there is a right-wing majority for instance and a right-wing bill, the left-wing minority legislators can offer amendments to make the bill less and less right-wing, and as long as each of these amendments is supported by the swing legislators they will get through.
Giving the leader power to veto at several different stages of legislating is not actually substantively different from just giving the leader veto power over the final bill. A legislature could do all of the negotiation before a bill is introduced, then immediately propose an amendment that changes the bill to what they want it to look like, and vetoing this amendment is basically the same as vetoing the bill. It is different in appearance though, which I think makes it less likely that this will happen. The whole committee and amendment process is also just a useful one that legislators might not want to skip.
Speaker
In addition to the leader of the country, there is also the leader of the legislature itself, which I’ll call the speaker for clarity as that’s what it’s called in the US and UK. They’re responsible for selecting which bills and amendments to bring up for a vote, deciding on the schedule of the legislature, sending bills to their appropriate committees, etc.
In the US, the speaker is a member of the majority party, and in fact broadly has the powers that I described the leader having above. In the UK, the speaker is a nonpartisan figure. In both cases, the speaker acts in accordance with legislative rules and norms, importantly those giving voice to the minority party(ies). I think it’s better to have the speaker be a nonpartisan figure to make it more likely that they follow norms. You’d select them the same way you’d select heads of non-partisan entities. The system I proposed in my other piece is to have secret ballot, with a supermajority requirement, and if the legislature fails to select one then all legislators (or some random fraction of them) become ineligible for re-election.
Committees
After a bill is introduced, and after a potential first round of voting/amendment, it goes to committee. In theory, committee is where the hard negotiation on a bill can take place. In practice, the real negotiation takes place only among members of the majority bloc (the only ones whose votes are actually needed to pass legislation) and in informal settings, so that they can be in secret, have staff present, discuss in smaller groups, etc.
The real function of committees is mostly twofold.
Inspection
The first is to ensure that somebody thoroughly inspects a bill before it passes. They may not be the only ones inspecting a bill, but at least they are one set of eyes on it. Members on a committee should hopefully be more invested in a bill during a debate on it than most legislators are during floor debate.
In most countries, the committee votes on amendments to the bill and then has to approve final text to send to the legislature as a whole. This is fine, although I also think it’s ok if the committee just gives a nonbinding recommendation on the bill and recommends amendments. In the US, there are subcommittees within these committees, and this is how these subcommittees work: they give a recommendation before a bill travels to the committee at large, recommendations which can be ignored by the committee as a whole.
Committees should have the same structure as the legislature as a whole. So have one leader of the committee, called the chair, who schedules and organizes debate. You can have them appointed by the speaker or elected by the members of the committee in a similar way to the speaker. It might be harder to find a nonpartisan figure as committee chair, so maybe I’d make it a partisan figure and just allow members of the minority to send complaints to the speaker if they feel they aren’t getting adequate say. Alongside the chair, you have the same options for leader input as in the legislature as a whole, so either an appointed leader’s representative who has veto power over bills/amendments or a bunch of appointed leader’s representatives who each get a vote. These are important again for giving the leader agenda control and preventing the descent into Condorcetism.
I think you should make the debates in a committee secret, in order to maximize the amount of real legislating that takes place at this stage.
These debates are usually conducted using some variant of Robert’s Rules of Order, a manual with rules on conducting debate. The general idea is that people can make motions, and if they get a second they go to debate; then during this debate people can propose amendments to the motion, which are then also debated on and can be amended. These seem fine.
Oversight
The other major role of a committee is holding hearings. These serve a few purposes. For opposition legislators, it allows them to expose the majority’s actions to the public so they could hopefully win the next election. For the majority bloc legislators, in a parliamentary democracy it allows the majority to keep tabs on what the government is doing so they can pressure them and call a vote of no confidence if necessary (and the same goes to a lesser extent for impeachment in a presidential democracy). Lastly, for all legislators, it gives them information that they can use to better fulfill other parts of their job like crafting laws and approving minister appointments.
At these hearings both the majority and minority bloc should be able to ask questions.
I think a good mechanism might be that hearings can be private if a supermajority of the committee agrees to it. This will probably be if the members of the minority want to allow the majority to be more candid in their questioning of the same-party executive. If one of the majority or minority wants the hearing to be public, it should be though, so as to inform the public of the testimony as well, except for classified information.
Specialization
In most countries, committees that inspect bills are standing (i.e., permanent) committees, inspecting all the bills that come in on a certain topic. The UK is unique for having committees formed with the specific purpose of analyzing a certain bill. I think standing committees generally make more sense to allow legislators to become more knowledgeable in a specific area. The UK does have standing committees for the purpose of oversight, and I think it makes sense that these committees use the knowledge gained from oversight to craft legislation as well.
The choice of which committee to send a bill to should be up to the speaker or other nonpartisan figures they appoint. I would also consider sending a bill to multiple committees in sequence if they touch on multiple areas.
Committees should in my view be about ~15 people. This means sacrificing quite a bit of representativeness of the legislature as a whole (which is why I would rather not give committees the ability to veto legislation), but ultimately I think any bigger and you start to lose the advantages of committees over the legislature as a whole.
In the US, committees are of size 30+ and what I described as a committee is the size of a subcommittee. But honestly I think these subcommittees should just be the real committees and you should skip the step where the committee as a whole debates. If you want to hold hearings where more than 15 people get to ask questions, you can have joint hearings between multiple committees.
Position Selection
You need some way of selecting members of each committee, as well as other party leadership figures like whip (the person who is responsible for counting and ensuring votes from their party).
I think party leadership figures should all be directly elected so that the legislative elite in a party is not all dominated by a single person. Secret ballot is fine, this isn’t something the public should be concerned with.
Committee selection is more interesting. I think every committee should be represented proportionally by party. For small parties (too small for one seat on a committee, also maybe not enough legislators to fit on every committee) I would err on the side of letting them on committees; the one thing is you need to make sure the majority coalition parties have a majority on each committee.
Then you have to decide which legislators from each party get each committee spot. What’s usually done in practice is that party leadership selects everything. I like this for its tendency to reward better, more active legislators, but I really dislike how this rewards party loyalty. I think there is already enough incentive for legislators to be loyal to their party through party candidate selection, and legislators should already be pretty aligned with the party. If you do decide to go with leadership selection, which I don’t think is outrageous, the one thing is I wouldn’t let leadership remove people from their committee posts if they’re disloyal.
The alternative is probably to come up with some ranking for legislators, and then have the legislators sequentially pick their committee spots: the first one on the ranking gets first pick, then the second one, etc. This allows everyone to pick the committee they’re most interested in, while also rewarding people higher on the ranking. If you want people to be on multiple committees, you could have two rounds, the first time everyone gets to pick their first committee, and the second time everyone gets to pick their second committee.
There are a few options for this ranking:
If you have list proportional representation, you can make it the list ranking. See my post on party candidate selection on how to choose that list
Order of seniority (how many terms a legislator has served for)
Random
I think any of these are defensible. I would also consider allowing party leadership to determine the very top of the ranking so they can choose who gets to be on the powerful committees, so that hopefully more competent legislators take those spots.
To promote continuity, you can also make it so that people are guaranteed a spot on eg 1 of the committees they’re currently serving on, so that they aren’t constantly shuffled between committees.
I also think two people, not necessarily from the same party, should be able to swap committee appointments. If you have party leadership select positions and want to get really fancy, you can turn this into a stable matching problem. Party leadership lists a ranking for each committee of who they think should get the spot, every legislator lists a ranking of which committees they want to be on, and then you calculate which legislator belongs on which committee to make it so that there are no remaining intra-party swaps. There is a nice algorithm to calculate this.
Floor Debate
Various thoughts on floor debate:
Most legislatures also abide by some variant of Robert’s Rules of Order for floor debate. The one part that I am a bit wary of for floor debate is the idea of unanimity and seconds - as a legislature grows in size, you are less and less likely to see unanimity and more likely to have ideas be seconded. Maybe I’d make it so that a constant 1% of the legislature has to object for a motion not to be unanimous or for it to be considered seconded.
Generally what you want out of floor debate is that people from both sides can give a bunch of speeches on the bill before you pass it. My hope is that these speeches are primarily meant to convince other legislators of their position. In practice, though, these speeches tend to be more targeted at the public, and I am skeptical that they actually accomplish much because how many people are watching legislators give speeches on C-SPAN. The one purpose I can see public-facing speeches actually serving is as a signal of the views of the legislator giving the speech.
The speaker should select all bills and amendments that seem likely to pass (i.e. have the leader’s blessing + majority support, or have supermajority support). One fun mechanism here that bypasses the speaker is to force a piece of legislation (or amendment) to the floor if it gets the signature of a majority of the legislature (without getting the veto signature of the leader)
The full text of a bill should be released like a week before it is debated for smaller bills or a month before for larger bills, so that people have time to read it before deciding what amendments to propose and whether to vote for it. I’d make an exception for bills that get 2/3 support; in general I think a 2/3 majority should be able to do whatever it wants, bypassing any and all legislative rules.
I think floor debate should be public. I don’t expect much serious negotiation to occur in the form of legislators giving speeches on the floor anyway, and I do think it’s important for the public to see the amendments that are proposed and who votes for them.
Factions
In the US, there are “caucuses”, groups of legislators (usually from one party) that share common views. This is helpful in allowing them to vote as a bloc to get more of what they want. These are good and I’d encourage any legislature to have them. It’s good when legislators can use their leverage to demand changes.