Senate Inequality Beyond Framers' Frame of Reference

While the Framers of the American Constitution were “pretty smart,” they had no experience with the type of representational inequality of today’s Senate. The Gini index of representational inequality in the Senate was 0.342 in 1790 and was 0.506 in 2015, the latest date from the data. This is an enormous change—in the income inequality literature, a change of 0.03 is considered “salient.”1

Another way to think about this, rather than with the difficult to interpret Gini, is the “social tables” approach preferred by Piketty.2 This shows us that the 50% of the population with the least representation in the Senate had 28.6% of senators in 1790 and a shocking 17.2% in 2015.

This begs the question, what about a state needs representation?


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  1. Atkinson (2015). https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674504769

  2. Piketty (2014), 246-270.

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Joseph de la Torre Dwyer
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My research interests include distributive justice; the principles of responsibility, desert, and control; and reproducible research with R.

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