Arnold Kling conducts an interesting thought experiment over at Tech Central Station. First, he identifies the problem: the American political system is unresponsive to voters (no matter who we vote in, the system never changes) and prone to pork-barrel politics.

Terry Anderson and Peter Hill make an argument that suggests that democracy does not scale well. As the size of the constituency group gets large, the politician becomes less accountable. Politicians find it easier to extract rents and abuse powers. The end-of-session legislative victories for President Bush and the GOP illustrate the problem. CAFTA passed, but with large concessions to special interests that threaten to undermine the trade benefits. The energy bill was an exercise in pork, as was the transportation bill. To anyone outside of the political/lobbyist complex, it was an all-too-typically dismal legislative performance.

Secondly, he makes an unusual proposal for giving power back to the people:

I think that Anderson and Hill offer a clue. The sheer size of modern electoral constituencies makes politics a matter of financial muscle and mass marketing. Only with smaller electoral constituencies would the incentive structure change to reduce the arrogance and rent-seeking of elected officials and powerful interest groups. We cannot have an accountable democracy with such large political units. We need to break the political entities in the United States down to a manageable size. Instead of the present 50 states, the largest of which have more than 30 million people each, we should break the country into 250 states, with 1.2 million people each. Some rural states would increase in geographic area. At the other end of the population density scale, the largest metropolitan areas would be divided into multiple states. Each of the 250 states should have two Representatives and one Senator. However, the Representatives and Senators should not be elected directly by the people. The Constitution originally called for Senators to be elected by state legislatures. We should go back to that, and, because of the growth in the population at large, we should adopt such a system for Representatives, also. Representatives and Senators should be elected by state legislatures, so that the accountability of Congressional legislators is not diluted. The state legislators who elect Representatives and Senators will have an incentive to monitor them. Each of the 250 states should be divided into 400 towns of 3,000 people each. Overall, there will be 100,000 such towns in the United States. Each town should elect a town council of 5 people, as well as one representative to the state legislature.

Read the whole thing. While he acknowledges that this would never happen in real life, it is a good way of thinking about the problem.