Writing about the representation of the UK Parliament, reminded me of some work i did in 2014, when looking at the results of the last European Parliament elections. The chart below shows the number of people represented by an MEP by country, the Spanish are the least represented and the Luxembourgois the best, varying from 850,000 to 77,000; that’s eleven times better for Luxembourgois. It should be noted that the 77,000 population it takes to earn an MEP in Luxembourg is similar to the number that the Tories propose for British MPs, except the Tories are planning that MPs only represent electors, not the total population.
We can see that the system benefits the smaller nations, and that to be fair with the same rate of representation as the Luxembourgois there would need to be over 6,500 MEPs. It would be very difficult to run plenary sessions of such size as the amount of time available to talk would mean that many would have to remain silent.
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Further reading led me to write this about the Welsh Sennedd and refer to the optimum number of politicians which is suggested by Academics to be a ∛ rule, i.e the ∛ of the represented population.
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Earlier today, I came across the policy statement, known as the Cambridge Compromise. It implements decreasing proportionality with a floor and ceiling. WRT to the article above either they got it wrong or I did.