The data says: to fix the LA City Council, think big and quadruple its size.
The Los Angeles City Council has the worst ratio of population to councilmembers in the country. The current plans to increase its size are thinking too small.
Los Angeles politics has been rocked by a leaked recording of three Los Angeles City Councilmembers making racist comments while scheming to racially gerrymander LA during the redistricting process. While the immediate reaction has sparked anger, disgust, and calls for the resignation of the three councilmembers, the fallout from the leaked recordings has also reignited discussions about the structure — specifically, the size — of the LA City Council.
Let’s see what the data tells us about the LA City Council’s size. A reasonable yet interesting way to examine a legislative body is to consider how many people are represented by a legislator, e.g., the ratio of city population to city council size. Through that lens, we see that each of LA’s fifteen city councilmembers represents over a quarter million people — specifically, a whopping 259,916 Angelenos.
Upon seeing those numbers, you might say, “So what if each individual LA City Councilmember must represent a lot of people? LA is a big city after all.” But we just need to look at the two other biggest cities in America — New York and Chicago — to clearly see that city councils don’t have to be tiny like ours. New York’s City Council has 50 seats while Chicago’s has 51, putting their city councils at over three times larger than ours despite similar city populations. Thus, we see that our extremely disproportionate city council isn’t by nature but is instead by neglected design: our city council hasn’t added seats since 1925, when the city had a population of just 1.2 million residents (over three times smaller than our current population).
As a result of this neglect, the LA City Council is now literally the worst city council in America, as measured by how many people are represented by each city council member (Figure 1). The average city council member in the other 99 largest American cities represents just under 60,000 residents, which is 77% smaller than what we have here in LA.
But more importantly, the size of the LA City Council also deserves scrutiny because there’s a strong argument that it would work better if it had far more seats. When legislative districts are small — because there are more districts overall — people tend to be more satisfied with and trusting of their representative, likely because they get to interact directly with them more often. Moreover, smaller districts can make running for office less expensive, lowering the barrier to entry to run for office while also decreasing the influence of money and special interests in elections. Finally, having more seats on the city council dilutes the power of any individual legislator, thereby decreasing the potential for corruption, like the pay-to-play schemes we’ve seen many times between developers and LA City Councilmembers.
Having a larger city council could also help alleviate the unfortunate sense of zero-sum racial politics that pervades Los Angeles. The councilmember audio leak was a recent reminder that having so few seats on the council often means that ethnic groups must beat out others to gain representation on the council. Having more city council seats would allow distinct communities to elect from within without the zero-sum political calculus.
To be clear, I’m not saying that LA’s measly city council size is the only reason for corruption and dysfunction — it’s a complicated problem fed by many factors — but it’s hard to ignore the elephant in the room.
In fact, the size of the LA City Council is so bad that it looks bad even compared to state legislatures around the country (Figure 2). When compared against the upper houses of state legislatures — like the California State Senate — an LA City Councilmember represents more people than state senators from 43 out of 50 states. When compared against the lower houses of state legislatures — like the California State Assembly — LA City Councilmembers each represent more people than state representatives in any other state except California. That is not good! We are doing an apples-and-oranges comparison between a city government council and higher-level of state governments that are often designed to be less representative — since they are meant to represent a whole state instead the small geographic area of city — and still our city council looks bad.
The most ambitious plan being floated by LA City officials is unfortunately wildly unambitious. LA City Attorney Mike Feuer has called for doubling the size of the LA City Council. Yet, at 30 city council seats, we would have roughly 130,000 residents per city councilmember. This plan would bring us from the worst ratio of councilmembers to residents in American cities to…eighth worst. Hardly an improvement, I’d say. (To Mr. Feuer’s credit, he has also called for using an independent redistricting commission, a move that would greatly improve our local city’s democracy.)
So, what would it take to bring LA in line with other large American cities? We need to think big and at least quadruple the size of the city council! To match the average ratio of city councilmembers to residents among the other 99 largest cities, LA would need to have 65 councilmembers, which is over four times what we have now. Even if we attempted to just match the representation levels in America’s fellow big 25 cities, LA would need at least 41 councilmembers, but that seems like shooting low when New York and Chicago already have at least 50 each. And why should we simply try to match the other two large American cities — whose ratio still isn’t stellar, by the way — when we have a chance to overhaul the city council.
On an ending note, I think there are other interesting solutions currently being floated that are not mutually exclusive to increasing the city council’s size. For example, some are calling for multimember districts in the LA City Council*, since this would alleviate political polarization and help increase political and ideological representation. Alternatively, an organization called Public Access Democracy is floating a very different remake for city government: electing city council members by lottery in a manner similar to jury duty. These ideas also deserve some careful looks while we are discussing a city council overhaul, but I will still insist that the data shows how desperately we need to add far more city councilmembers in Los Angeles, regardless of what other reforms we also choose to enact.
*Author’s Note: I did this analysis and wrote this all up before this wonderful linked article—which covers some of the same topics about city council size—was published, but I failed to publish mine in a timely manner. Because my piece and the linked piece discuss things from different angles, and because I don’t want this work to go to waste, I’ve published this anyways on Medium! Please read Stan Oklobdzija’s piece in SlowBoring because it’s great.
