United States Congress: Truly Representative?

Compiled by David Pakman

          Are the United States House and Senate truly representative of the country's population? Surprisingly enough, the Republican/Democrat analysis common to the website will be left out here, and substituted for by that of race and gender.

          The US Senate has 100 members, and the House of Representatives 435. All 535 members are elected via a standard election. Let's look at the makeup of these two bodies compared to the makeup of the United States. Before doing this, it's important to know constituents of the US.

NOTE: Percentages do not add up to 100% due to rounding, and because Hispanics may be of any race and are therefore counted under more than one category.

          Now let's look at how accurately the constituents of Congress represent this gender and racial distribution, first for race:

House:

          The House of Representatives has 363 white members, and 72 minorities. The minority members of the House make up about 16.5%, which is only slightly under-representing the US population. African-Americans are just slightly underrepresented, at just under 10% versus the 12.8% of the population they make up. Hispanics, on the other hand, are vastly under-represented in the House, making up just 5.5%, while they constitute 13.7% of the US population.

Senate:

          The Senate is a different situation entirely from the House. 95% of its members are white. This means that minorities make up only 5% of the Senate, although they make up just under 20% of the US population. Looking at each race individually is almost futile, since there are just five minority members. The only African-American Senator is Barack Obama, just elected on November 2nd, 2004. There are 2 Hispanic and 2 Asian senators.

          Second, how is gender represented?

House:

Senate:

          The House and Senate are both similar when looking at the gender makeup; neither represents the US population accurately. Women make up slightly more than half of the country, yet they make up only 15.6% of the House of Representatives and 14% of the Senate.

          Overall, political affiliations aside, the United States Congress is not representative of the US population in terms of gender and race. However, some would argue that what matters in terms of representation is not gender or race, but rather ideology, and that the ideologies of Americans are, in fact, represented accurately by the Representatives and Senators in Washington DC. I'm not sure how accurate that view is, but looking at race and gender neither proves nor disproves whether how people think is represented truthfully.

Please send any questions, comments, or hate mail to me here.