I’m not sure if this is the answer you’re looking for, but: most things that could exist don’t. The space of ideas is wide, and few of them are implemented in practice. Is this idea particularly privileged in the space of possible governance ideas, in such a way where you would have expected it to have been tried?
The actual reason is probably the boring fact that political functions (laws) almost never take macroeconomic metrics as input, except population. Some take individual measures like “the sale price of a good” or “a company’s income”. It would be more idiomatic to apportion voting power to a house of district governors based on taxes contributed to the federal budget.
As to why that’s never happened. I dunno. I think basically any representation apportionment method except population or arbitrary clustering (or like, tradition, I guess? but there’s no tradition for monetary contribution) is pretty much taboo, and something something Chesterton’s Fence (though population-based voting has started to run into the Old People Voting Themselves Infinite Money exploit in the west).
There are no objective measures of economic productivity that would stand up to the Goodhart-pressure of being used as criteria for political (dis)empowerment. Whatever measures were chosen would be immediately gamed-to-hell, and would cease to measure anything but “who was in power when the measurement was conducted?”
What about costly signals? E.g. every year, each state chooses how much money they donate to the federal government. Their voting power in the second chamber is proportional to the size of their donation.
That might have some funny properties. Suppose that New York and Texas were equally rich, but New Yorkers uniformly want more government than Texans do. Texans would be made to pay more than New Yorkers are willing to, in order to outvote the New Yorkers and not actually use that money in the federal budget. At that point, the excess donations would presumably be returned to the states or the people.
So maybe this ends up being another second-price auction?
seems fine? if some states are willing to tax their citizens a lot more than other states and give all of that money to the federal government, seems reasonable to give them more say? and of course if they go too far, the residents there can simply choose to leave to a different state, just like they can now.
spending excess money seems way easier than the opposite problem. worst case you just stash it away. but realistically spending will always be ballooning out of control.
Hong Kong had seats in its legislature designed for special interest/business groups (see Functional constituency on wikipedia). I don’t understand it very well though.
Historically, the British House of Lords at least approximated representation based on wealth (albeit somewhat indirectly) and various other arrangements existed to guarantee the political power of the aristocracy who, before industrialization, were the wealthy.
This is not a very popular thing to do because it’s anathema to the normative basis of democracy (one person, one vote). If one believes that the wealthy deserve increased de jure political representation, then why have a democracy at all and not some sort of oligarchy? And, of course, democratic systems de facto do give the wealthy extra power via various channels.
if you really believe in one person one vote, then bicameraity is crazy. people in small states have vastly more power per person than in big states in the US
Bicameral systems can respect one person one vote, and they even do in the 49 states with bicameral legislatures.
The US Senate is a weird kludge that was necessary to secure support for the constitution. No one would arrive at it from first principles.
The best argument you can make for the Senate is that it’s necessary to protect vulnerable minorities (residents of small states). And democracies tend to trade off in various ways to protect vulnerable minorities at the expense of democratic purity (e.g., via constitutional provisions). That’s a pretty silly argument so far as it goes but does have a little more historical punch. You can’t make it for a hypothetical system with a chamber to protect the interests of the rich who are very obviously not a vulnerable minority at all. And there’s a much higher level of normative repugnance to “we’ve got to look out for the rich” than for most other groups you can fill in the blank with there.
what’s the point of having a second chamber if you’re going to apportion it by population as well? afaict, this is a historical oddity due to states copying the federal system but then getting squished by Reynolds v Sims, at which point it would have been really annoying to abolish the state senate. all the countries I can think of with a bicameral legislature (US, Canada, UK, Germany) have one of the chambers apportioned by something other than population.
There’s countries that use equal-population districts for both houses, but at that point it feels like the bicameralism is just copied from the US without strong reasoning (e.g. Italy, Japan, South Korea).
Sure, as I said it’s approximate and there are exceptions.
But entry into the peerage also wasn’t closed off, and sufficient wealth was a fairly common pathway. Get wealthy enough, make a few connections or well-placed donations, and you’d wind up in the House of Lords (e.g., the Rothschilds or William Lever—the “lever” in Unilever).
Population alone is easy to Goodhart, but through both gerrymandering and immigration, both of which take some degree of time to do. Economic productivity is even easier—set up a few innocuous subsidies, hook up your core constituents (at the expense of everyone else) in the span of a single election cycle, and you’ve got a permanent lock on that chamber. Daycare centers, bloated NoVA contracts, and perpetual small business loans are just the start.
At the subnational or individual level? Apportioning e.g. states this way has the issue of being arbitrary and sensitive to the specific borders you draw, but was proposed by Madison IIRC. You can “gerrymander” these states (intentionally or unintentionally) by packing a lot of high-productivity citizens into a state with a majority of low-income voters.
At the individual level, weighted setups like this were very common in the 19th century. I know Prussia/Germany, Belgium, Austria, and France used class-based voting systems of this sort. These systems were mostly swept away in the late 19th and early 20th centuries under pressure from liberals and social democrats (sometimes peacefully, as in Belgium, and sometimes by revolutionaries as in Germany).
Of these, the Prussian three-class franchise was the “purest”/closest to what you describe: people were assigned one of 3 classes based on how much they paid in taxes, with all three groups paying the same amount overall. (Taxes were roughly proportional to income.) Each of these groups received the same number of representatives.
the three-class franchise seems like one reasonable implementation of this type of policy within a unitary state. within a US-like federation, you could have the house continue to function as it does right now, and have a senate where the number of senators is proportional to the tax revenue contributed by each state.
Yep! Like I mentioned, this has the problem that state borders are fairly arbitrary and let you “launder” one group’s wealth into another group’s voting power.
But I just remembered—before Reynolds v. Sims established “one man, one vote”, New Hampshire used this exact system. From 1784 through 1964, districts were apportioned based on taxable wealth.
To be more precise—I don’t think it’s logically coherent to apportion voting power between states according to wealth, but between people by population (i.e. equally). Either you want to upweight high taxpayers or you don’t.
The capability to lobby using control over capital, in turn apportioned by economic productivity, seems like a kind of third column in the legislature?
why are there no bicameral legislatures with one chamber apportioned by population, and one chamber apportioned by economic productivity?
I’m not sure if this is the answer you’re looking for, but: most things that could exist don’t. The space of ideas is wide, and few of them are implemented in practice. Is this idea particularly privileged in the space of possible governance ideas, in such a way where you would have expected it to have been tried?
The actual reason is probably the boring fact that political functions (laws) almost never take macroeconomic metrics as input, except population. Some take individual measures like “the sale price of a good” or “a company’s income”. It would be more idiomatic to apportion voting power to a house of district governors based on taxes contributed to the federal budget.
As to why that’s never happened. I dunno. I think basically any representation apportionment method except population or arbitrary clustering (or like, tradition, I guess? but there’s no tradition for monetary contribution) is pretty much taboo, and something something Chesterton’s Fence (though population-based voting has started to run into the Old People Voting Themselves Infinite Money exploit in the west).
There are no objective measures of economic productivity that would stand up to the Goodhart-pressure of being used as criteria for political (dis)empowerment. Whatever measures were chosen would be immediately gamed-to-hell, and would cease to measure anything but “who was in power when the measurement was conducted?”
What about costly signals? E.g. every year, each state chooses how much money they donate to the federal government. Their voting power in the second chamber is proportional to the size of their donation.
That might have some funny properties. Suppose that New York and Texas were equally rich, but New Yorkers uniformly want more government than Texans do. Texans would be made to pay more than New Yorkers are willing to, in order to outvote the New Yorkers and not actually use that money in the federal budget. At that point, the excess donations would presumably be returned to the states or the people.
So maybe this ends up being another second-price auction?
seems fine? if some states are willing to tax their citizens a lot more than other states and give all of that money to the federal government, seems reasonable to give them more say? and of course if they go too far, the residents there can simply choose to leave to a different state, just like they can now.
spending excess money seems way easier than the opposite problem. worst case you just stash it away. but realistically spending will always be ballooning out of control.
Hong Kong had seats in its legislature designed for special interest/business groups (see Functional constituency on wikipedia). I don’t understand it very well though.
Historically, the British House of Lords at least approximated representation based on wealth (albeit somewhat indirectly) and various other arrangements existed to guarantee the political power of the aristocracy who, before industrialization, were the wealthy.
This is not a very popular thing to do because it’s anathema to the normative basis of democracy (one person, one vote). If one believes that the wealthy deserve increased de jure political representation, then why have a democracy at all and not some sort of oligarchy? And, of course, democratic systems de facto do give the wealthy extra power via various channels.
if you really believe in one person one vote, then bicameraity is crazy. people in small states have vastly more power per person than in big states in the US
Bicameral systems can respect one person one vote, and they even do in the 49 states with bicameral legislatures.
The US Senate is a weird kludge that was necessary to secure support for the constitution. No one would arrive at it from first principles.
The best argument you can make for the Senate is that it’s necessary to protect vulnerable minorities (residents of small states). And democracies tend to trade off in various ways to protect vulnerable minorities at the expense of democratic purity (e.g., via constitutional provisions). That’s a pretty silly argument so far as it goes but does have a little more historical punch. You can’t make it for a hypothetical system with a chamber to protect the interests of the rich who are very obviously not a vulnerable minority at all. And there’s a much higher level of normative repugnance to “we’ve got to look out for the rich” than for most other groups you can fill in the blank with there.
what’s the point of having a second chamber if you’re going to apportion it by population as well? afaict, this is a historical oddity due to states copying the federal system but then getting squished by Reynolds v Sims, at which point it would have been really annoying to abolish the state senate. all the countries I can think of with a bicameral legislature (US, Canada, UK, Germany) have one of the chambers apportioned by something other than population.
There’s countries that use equal-population districts for both houses, but at that point it feels like the bicameralism is just copied from the US without strong reasoning (e.g. Italy, Japan, South Korea).
It’s certainly possible but very weird/pointless. IMO it’s not clear what the point is since the two houses will be effectively the same.
There were wealthy merchants that weren’t aristocrats even before the industrial revolution really started.
Sure, as I said it’s approximate and there are exceptions.
But entry into the peerage also wasn’t closed off, and sufficient wealth was a fairly common pathway. Get wealthy enough, make a few connections or well-placed donations, and you’d wind up in the House of Lords (e.g., the Rothschilds or William Lever—the “lever” in Unilever).
Population alone is easy to Goodhart, but through both gerrymandering and immigration, both of which take some degree of time to do. Economic productivity is even easier—set up a few innocuous subsidies, hook up your core constituents (at the expense of everyone else) in the span of a single election cycle, and you’ve got a permanent lock on that chamber. Daycare centers, bloated NoVA contracts, and perpetual small business loans are just the start.
At the subnational or individual level? Apportioning e.g. states this way has the issue of being arbitrary and sensitive to the specific borders you draw, but was proposed by Madison IIRC. You can “gerrymander” these states (intentionally or unintentionally) by packing a lot of high-productivity citizens into a state with a majority of low-income voters.
At the individual level, weighted setups like this were very common in the 19th century. I know Prussia/Germany, Belgium, Austria, and France used class-based voting systems of this sort. These systems were mostly swept away in the late 19th and early 20th centuries under pressure from liberals and social democrats (sometimes peacefully, as in Belgium, and sometimes by revolutionaries as in Germany).
Of these, the Prussian three-class franchise was the “purest”/closest to what you describe: people were assigned one of 3 classes based on how much they paid in taxes, with all three groups paying the same amount overall. (Taxes were roughly proportional to income.) Each of these groups received the same number of representatives.
the three-class franchise seems like one reasonable implementation of this type of policy within a unitary state. within a US-like federation, you could have the house continue to function as it does right now, and have a senate where the number of senators is proportional to the tax revenue contributed by each state.
Yep! Like I mentioned, this has the problem that state borders are fairly arbitrary and let you “launder” one group’s wealth into another group’s voting power.
But I just remembered—before Reynolds v. Sims established “one man, one vote”, New Hampshire used this exact system. From 1784 through 1964, districts were apportioned based on taxable wealth.
To be more precise—I don’t think it’s logically coherent to apportion voting power between states according to wealth, but between people by population (i.e. equally). Either you want to upweight high taxpayers or you don’t.
The capability to lobby using control over capital, in turn apportioned by economic productivity, seems like a kind of third column in the legislature?