UC Irvine

A simple model is presented, to express the size of national (and provincial) assemblies in terms of the size of the total population and of its degree of social mobilization. The basic assumption is that efficiency is optimized when the number of communication channels within the assembly equals the number of interest aggregation channels in each constituency. Adult literacy is taken as a measure of social mobilization. This leads to the equation A = (2LWP0) 1 3N where A is the assembly size, LW is the fraction of literate adults in the total population P0, and N is a term representing the effects of all other factors. For the model to be valid, the world-wide average of log N should be zero, and its range should be small compared to the range of log A. This is so, indeed. © 1972.