alexist

When I was reading the Australian electoral coverage I was struck by how few seats there are in the Australian House of Representatives--only 150. The map of divisions (as they're called) is interesting; it shows how skewed Australia's population distribution is. The division of Kalgoorlie covers most of Western Australia--it's 2.29 million km2, the largest single-member electorate in the world. I had to go look up the size of Alaska. It's only 1.7M km2.)

After thinking about it, though, I realised that proportionally, it isn't that small: it's that I'm now used to the House of Commons, which is absurdly large. If Australia had a level of representation close to that of the US, it would only have 30 seats in the House. (See figures below.)

Compare various English speaking nations: (I'm using population per seat, rather than electors, because it's easiest. Populations are 2007 estimates, rounded. This is, of course, an average; due to various factors, seats in each country are not perfectly proportionate.)

Australia: pop. 21 million, 150 seats: 140,000 people per seat
Canada: pop. 33 million, 308 seats (*): 107,000 people per seat
United Kingdom: pop. 60 million, 646 seats (**): 93,000 people per seat
United States: pop. 302 million, 435 seats: 694,000 people per seat

(* - 22 ridings will be added to the House of Commons at the next election.)
(** - 13 seats were eliminated from the House of Commons at the last election, correcting Scotland's historic over-representation.)

And that doesn't take into account the fact that the US mandates 1 seat per state regardless of population. 4 states (Alaska, North Dakota, Vermont, and Wyoming) have a population under 694,000 (in Wyoming's case, only 515,000).

ETA: I believe Canada mandates 1 seat per province/territory as well, and the Yukon, NWT, and Nunavut all have less than 100,000 people. (Apparently, there's a 1 seat per territory regardless of population rule, but since they're so sparsely populated, any chance of this affecting them in the other direction, i.e. under-representation, is non-existent. Wikipedia has an interesting table on the relative representation of different provinces, and how the number of seats is calculated: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_House_of_Commons#Members_and_elections)

No wonder our central government is so overactive: it's too big and needs to make work for itself! :-)